Inktomi Readies New Web Search Technology

Inktomi Corp., a leading purveyor of Internet navigation tools, will announce today a search technology designed to solve a key challenge of the Internet: how to use human intelligence to organize the World Wide Web as it grows to a billion documents and beyond. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company’s Directory Engine uses semantic and contextual clues in a small number of hand-selected documents to automatically find and categorize the most relevant pages on the same topic. The new technology would be linked with Inktomi’s shopping engine to combine e-commerce and search. Paul Gauthier, Inktomi’s chief technology officer, said the product will be marketed to major search sites and to “vertical portals” that specialize in subjects such as sports or health.