Leverages Human Intelligence Across Millions of Documents

New Inktomi Technology Integrates Portal Services Suite

San Mateo, Calif., June 15, 1999 - Inktomi Corp. (NASDAQ: INKT), developer of scalable Internet infrastructure software, today announced the Web's first customizable, automated Directory Engine. The Inktomi Directory Engine uses breakthrough new technology, leveraging human intelligence to categorize millions of documents within an automated Web directory. The new offering allows portal sites to blend in their own unique content and integrate advanced Web search and shopping capabilities into a single seamless solution, delivering an intuitive and powerful Internet experience to users. Directory Engine has been adopted by existing and new Inktomi customers, including: Aeneid and partners, including VerticalNet; GoTo.com; GoNow.com; GoProfit.com; and Knight Ridder Real Cities.

Inktomi also today unveiled its new Concept Induction™ technology. Developed by Inktomi scientists over the past 18 months, this new technology uses advanced supercomputing techniques to model human conceptual classification of content, and projects this intelligence across millions of documents. Using this technology, the Inktomi Directory Engine has built the Web's largest categorized directory with an initial coverage of over 1.3 million documents. Concept Induction technology also leverages the link structure of the Web to discover conceptual linkages among documents and select the highest quality and most relevant content.

"Inktomi's launch of Directory Engine and the introduction of our new Concept Induction technology demonstrate our focus on building infrastructure that scales the Internet," said David Peterschmidt, president and chief executive officer of Inktomi. "The Web grows at a faster rate than any medium in history, and the future of Web directories will necessarily be a hybrid of human and machine."

Inktomi Directory Engine
The Directory Engine delivers a high degree of customization to portals and destination sites. Using the Directory Management System (DMS), portals can extensively "tune and prune" the Inktomi Master Directory to blend in their own unique content or existing directories, and change its navigation structure. The system allows portal editors to add or delete categories and individual documents, rearrange subject hierarchies, and map taxonomy structures between existing or third party directories. The intuitive Java interface for DMS supports hundreds of simultaneous editors, allowing large organizations to broadly leverage their in-house expertise or online user communities to constantly evolve and expand the directory.

For portals with existing human-built directories or content, the Directory Engine provides a powerful infrastructure to extend and enhance their existing investments. The Inktomi Directory Engine builds a conceptual model reflecting the portal's unique data structures and editorial flavor, and uses this model to automatically populate the directory with thousands or millions of additional relevant documents. Vertical portals and destination sites can build topic-specific directories that supplement their existing content and services.

Portal Services Integration
Inktomi's suite of portal services, including the Inktomi Search Engine, Inktomi Directory Engine, and Inktomi Shopping Engine, allows portals to incorporate their own content and communities to create unique services that enhance stickiness and revenue opportunities. The suite of portal services is engineered to tightly integrate data and functionality across applications. Directory Engine is the first Internet-scale directory to integrate full-text searching of documents, allowing users to alternately navigate by topic or keyword search. Because documents are crawled using the Inktomi Search Engine, the directory offers a high degree of freshness as well as powerful search tools. The Inktomi Search Engine, in turn, can now integrate concept recognition into keyword searches for added relevance and ease of use.

For example, a general search on the word "chips" interactively prompts the user to refine their search by selecting among topics such as "computer chips," "poker chips," and "potato chips." Additionally, the Inktomi Shopping Engine product database has been mapped into the Inktomi Master Directory, allowing portals to integrate online shopping offerings that match a user's topics of interest. This extensive integration across the portal's infrastructure, enabled by Inktomi's new Concept Induction technology, provides a seamless and compelling experience for users as well as new revenue streams for portal companies.

About Inktomi
Based in San Mateo, Calif., Inktomi (pronounced INK-tuh-me), develops and markets scalable software designed for the world's largest Internet infrastructure and media companies. Inktomi's products include the world's largest search engines, online comparison shopping solutions, and carrier-class network cache software. Inktomi works with leading companies including America Online, Excite@Home Network, CNET, CNN, GoTo.com, Intel, RealNetworks, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!. The company has offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.inktomi.com/.