Search engines: Yahoo buys Inktomi

December 26, 2002

It has been an exciting year search engine wise, and 2002 is not yet over. Yahoo! recently decided to start using Google results by default instead of listings from its own directory.

The idea was clearly that high quality search results will bring back visitors, and the number of visitors is -- ultimately -- what makes a search portal tick. For all practical purposes all Yahoo! sites now default to Google results, the only exception being that in some listings the page description is replaced by the Yahoo directory description.

Many observers have, however, suspected that this was not the end of the story. It wasn't. Yahoo! has now decided to buy another International search engine, Iktomi.

Inktomi provides search results to sites like MSN.com and (partly) to Hotbot.com. "Yahoo!'s vast reach and its unmatched breadth and depth of services, combined with Inktomi's outstanding engineering expertise and leading search technology, will help us achieve our goal of providing users with the most comprehensive, relevant and highest quality search solutions on the Web," said Terry Semel, Yahoo! chairman and CEO.

This is, of course, the kind of thing CEOs are expected to say in press releases. What he fails to say anything about, however, is how Inktomi data will be used on the Yahoo! sites.

We suspect that Yahoo! may go for a mix of Inktomi and Google results, effectively turning Yahoo! into a metasearch engine. However, Yahoo! may also decide to drop Google in favor of Inktomi.

This will make life more interesting for search engine optimizers, who were beginning to despair over a search world totally dominated by Google.

Source: Pandia

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