Angling to put a fresh spin on domain name submission services, VeriSign Inc. Thursday and Inktomi Corp. joined forces to roll out a listing service that allows site owners to showcase their pages on Inktomi's popular search index.

Created to help entrepreneurs establish a highly-visible Web presence, the cost of the first URL submission to Inktomi's Search/Submit service is $30 for a full year, with each new one available at $15 a pop. In an interesting twist, registrants don't have to be clients of VeriSign; they may have acquired their domain name from (gasp!) rival Register.com.

The Inktomi Search/Submit service differs from other free and paid submission services by including URLs within 48 hours and re-indexing clients' data every 48 hours to ensure up-to-date search results. The package also includes an account management tool for customers to confirm inclusion of listings and to update URLs if they change after subscribing to the service.

Subscribers can submit up to 100 URLs per order for initial and continued inclusion of their URL in the Inktomi index. Each listing is automatically added and updated in all search sites powered by the Inktomi index for one year.

Doug Wolford, senior vice president and general manager of Web Presence Services at VeriSign, said in a company statement the idea of the service was to help online entrepreneurs become ubiquitous on leading sites such as AOL and MSN.

Search/Submit is now available through VeriSign's Network Solutions domain name registration service and through Inktomi's portal partners.

VeriSign's co-launch of Inktomi's listing service came a day after it rolled out wireless payment platform services, part of a larger scheme to pair the domain name market with wireless users.

Next to its domain name business, which came vis-á-vis its swallowing of Network Solutions Inc. last spring, VeriSign also specializes in digital certificates. Along with Wednesday's conversion of its Payflow Pro software to wireless configurations, the infrastructure firm agreed to embed its digital certificate technology into Ericsson's WAP-enabled mobile phones as well as NTT DoCoMo's Java-ready 503i series phones.