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Yahoo Buying Inktomi

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the present-tense dept.

soldack writes "Byte And Switch has a story about Yahoo buying Inktomi. I imagine they will stop using Google. What does this mean for both Google and Yahoo? How much of Google's traffic came from Yahoo? How much is going to come from AOL using Google?" markpapadakis adds a link to CNET's story on same.

2 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. This won't make Yahoo stop using Google by seldolivaw · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google's pagerank algorithm suite is unmatched for searches "in the wild". It uses links between pages to work out search relevance. However, that algorithm is totally inappropriate for providing search within Yahoo's own categorised database; Inktomi's engine is precisely suited for such a task. Yahoo has been using Google and Inktomi's search tech for external and internal searches, respectively, for a while now. I see no reason for Yahoo's buyout to change this. I imagine Yahoo would buy Google too, if it could.

  2. Ideas by mugnyte · · Score: 5, Informative

    Inktomi's current customers

    Yahoo would be well-served building a cross-reference ranking from Google + Inktomi's results. Most of my searches are quite pointed anyway though, so I'm not sure how this could be improved.

    Go try the Hotbot or MSN searches yerself. This may well be the future rankings on Yahoo results.

    As a trial, I searched for "Oklahoma Dry Spell" and although there was one coinciding match in the top 2, the rest were completely different. It seems Inktomi is a bit more relaxed for inclusions. (14,888 vs Yahoo's 12,800).

    For one of the myriad of search engine reviews comparing (roughly) Inktomi and Yahoo/Google, see this page

    mug