Why Google Beat Inktomi: the Inside Story From Former Engineer

[lisajohn]

Inktomi back in the day was one of the biggest powers on the Internet, it was even the top search engine for some time. It powered MSN search and was eventually acquired by Yahoo for $240 million.

But the story you don’t hear very often is how Inktomi died. Diego Basch, a current LinkedIn employee and former Inktomi engineer shared his version in a blog post.

In March 2000 Inktomi had a market cap of $25 billion. Exactly one year later, the stock dropped 99.9 percent. Why?

Basch’s story begins in 1999. Yahoo was Inktomi’s biggest customer and began complaining because when you typed “Yahoo” they weren’t No. 1 in their own search results. Although Inktomi fixed the problem for Yahoo, they couldn’t solve this search problem for many other businesses and websites.

[Guest]

Inktomi did not have snippets or caching. Our execs claimed that we failed to want caching because our crawling cycle was a great deal shorter than google's. Instead of snippets, we had algorithmically-generated abstracts. The ones abstracts have been vain while you had been searching out something like new ipad screen decision.

[lisajohn]

Google realized that it's not all about displaying hundreds of results to the user but more about “satisfying the need for information.” As it turns out, Inktomi engineers preferred using Google more than the product that they were building.