Inktomi Corporation was a California company that provided software for Internet Service Providers, which was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the search engine they developed at the university.

Their software was incorporated in the widely-used HotBot search engine, which displaced AltaVista as the leading web-crawler-based search engine, and which was in turn displaced by Google. In a talk given to a UC Berkeley seminar on Search Engines in October 2005, Eric Brewer credited much of the AltaVista displacement to technical differences of scale (Inktomi used distributed network technology, while AltaVista ran everything on a single machine).

The company went on to develop Traffic Server, a proxy cache for web traffic and on-demand streaming media. Traffic Server found a limited marketplace due to several factors, but was deployed by several large service providers including AOL. In November 1999 Inktomi acquired Webspective; in August 2000 Inktomi acquired Ultraseek Server from Disney's Go.com; in September, 2000, Inktomi acquired FastForward Networks; in December 2000, Inktomi acquired the Content Bridge Business Unit from Adero, a content delivery network, which had formed the Content Bridge Alliance with Inktomi, AOL and a number of other ISPs, hosting providers and IP transport providers; and in June 2001 Inktomi acquired eScene Networks. Webspective developed technology for synchronizing and managing content across a host of distributed servers to be used in clustered or distributed load-balancing. Fast Forward developed software for the distribution of live streaming media over the Internet using "app-level" multicast technology. eScene Networks developed software that provided an integrated workflow for the management and publishing of video content (now owned by Media Publisher, Inc.). With this combination of technologies, Inktomi became an "arms merchant" to a growing number of Content Delivery Network (CDN) service providers. Inktomi stock peaked with a split-adjusted price of $241 a share in March 2000.

In earlier acquisitions Inktomi acquired C2B and Impulse Buy Networks, both companies which had pioneered the comparison shopping space and that had pioneered the performance based marketing market. With over 4 million products registered in the service in 1998, and serving millions of merchandise product offers daily across 20,000 websites including Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL shopping. Merchants paid a percentage of sales and or a cost per click for traffic sent to their websites, ultimately this model became known as pay per click and was perfected by Google and Overture Services, Inc..

The technology behind the Inktomi Proxy Server was acquired by Websense, who has modified it and included it their Webblazer product.

With the financial collapse of the service provider industry and overall burst of the dot-com bubble, Inktomi lost most of its customer base and ultimately was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002 for $1.63 a share. In a separate transaction, the Ultraseek Server product (renamed Inktomi Enterprise Search) was sold to competitor Verity, Inc. in late 2002.

The Inktomi Name and Logo

"The company's name, pronounced "INK-tuh-me," is derived from a Lakota Indian legend about a trickster spider character. Iktomi is known for his ability to defeat larger adversaries through wit and cunning." The Logo was created by co-founder, Tom Lamar, in 1996 while working for the company. The logo's unique and award winning design is related to the patterns found in a spider's web, the scalability of the software, and the primary and core nature of the innovations found at Inktomi.

Executives

Prior to the acquisition of Inktomi by Yahoo! in 2002:

Corporate Officers

David C. Peterschmidt - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Eric A. Brewer - Chief Scientist

Timothy J. Burch - Vice President of Human Resources

Ted Hally - Senior Vice President and General Manager of Network Products

Jerry M. Kennelly - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary

Al Shipp - Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations

Timothy Stevens - Senior Vice President of Business Affairs, General Counsel and Assistant Secretary

Steve Hill - Vice President of Europe

Board of Directors

David C. Peterschmidt - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer , Inktomi *Corporation

Dr. Eric A. Brewer - Chief Scientist, Inktomi Corporation

Frank Gill Retired - Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation

Fredric W. Harman - General Partner, Oak Investment Partners

Alan F. Shugart - Chief Executive Officer, Al Shugart International

Mission Statement

"The Inktomi mission is to build scalable software applications that are core to the Internet infrastructure."