By Rachel Chalmers
Inktomi Corp was particularly tickled to announce that its search engine will be incorporated into Microsoft Corp’s MSN because it lost that account in February 1999 to rival AltaVista Co. Dennis McEvoy, Inktomi’s VP of development and support, told ComputerWire, We were delighted to have Microsoft come back to us as a customer. From the search side, they just decided they liked us better. Inktomi now boasts what are arguably the three top sites on the web – AOL, Yahoo, MSN – as customers of its search services.
That’s not necessarily an indication of the quality of service from an end user’s point of view. McEvoy explained that part of what customers like about Inktomi’s service is the extent to which they can tweak the search results to feature their own content more prominently. Each customer is trying to create a unique experience, he argued, and that experience usually involves making their own content as sticky as possible. It’s a great feature for portals trying to increase their hit rates and hence their ad revenues, but it’s possibly less good for web surfers who are actually looking for objective information.
Inktomi is nevertheless pleased to have scored this point off its principal competitor. I think AltaVista is aggressive about wanting to be in the OEM search space, McEvoy said. AltaVista is, however, competing with its own potential customers. The more it tries to promote its own portal, the more direct its conflict with sites like MSN will become. By contrast, Inktomi has long positioned itself as an OEM, the Switzerland of searches. We are the only supplier of search services who is not also a site, McEvoy observed. Being unbranded is really important from a marketing point of view.
