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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Diego Basch

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On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab some popcorn and enjoy this story. IIRC, we had a network flow algorithm that was similar to PageRank, but it wasn’t the most useful feature. I remember a point where we discovered that the anchor text feature implementation had a bug, and correcting it led to a huge improvement in relevance, replicating Google’s results in some cases. Since then I’ve believed that PageRank was a bit of a misdirect, and anchor text was Google’s real secret sauce in the beginning.Another big advantage Google had through their front end was that they kept it ad-free for a long time, while other sites were under pressure to monetize. IWon was the worst, blinkiest offender, but every search en

On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab some popcorn and enjoy this story . Inktomi was the #1 search engine in the world for a while. When I joined we had just won the Yahoo contract, and were serving search results for HotBot (there is still a search page there!) At first I worked on developing crawling and indexing t

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