Inktomi Corporation was a California company that provided software for Internet service providers. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the search engine they developed at the university. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo! Inktomi's software was incorporated in the widely-used HotBot search engine, which displaced AltaVista as the leading web-crawler-based search engine, and which was in turn displaced by Google. In a talk given... to a UC Berkeley seminar on Search Engines in October 2005, Eric Brewer credited much of the AltaVista displacement to technical differences of scale. The company went on to develop Traffic Server, a proxy cache for web traffic and on-demand streaming media. Traffic Server found a limited marketplace due to several factors, but was deployed by several large service providers including AOL.
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