Inktomi
announced Wednesday it has signed with the UK’s top portal
Freeserve to become
its search engine of choice.
The two companies followed up on the announcement with the estimation that the Web
now boasts over a billion documents, a statement made to emphasize the importance of search engines.
John Pluthero, chief executive of Freeserve, said the Inktomi
search engine would not only provide general Web search capabilities
for Freeserve users but would help them explore the UK-oriented
content on subjects such as education, sport, music, travel
and technology.
“Additionally, advertisers on Freeserve will now have the
opportunity to offer highly targeted advertising based on key
word search,” said Pluthero.
In a separate announcement Wednesday, Inktomi said it has
created one of the world’s most extensive multimedia indexes,
containing over 2.5 million media files. Among the media
types it covers are Real Networks, MP3, MPEG, AVI and .wav
media files.
Inktomi has been working with NEC Research Institute on a
new study that shows the Web’s phenomenal growth to over
a billion unique pages. The latest WebMap index shows
that Inktomi’s search agents have located this number of
documents, making it the first search engine to reach this
milestone.
Steve Lawrence, research scientist at NEC Research Institute
confirmed the figure.
Inktomi uses what it calls Concept Induction technology to
model human conceptual classification of content. It tries
to discover all the conceptual linkages among documents, selecting
just the highest quality and most relevant content.
Freeserve’s John Pluthero said he was pleased with all the
enhancements to the Inktomi Search Engine.
“Inktomi’s scalable and highly customizable technology will
allow us to offer the most relevant, comprehensive search
results to our customers,” said Pluthero.