Inktomi Extends Search Software to Meet Language Needs of Global Enterprises and Destination Sites

Inktomi Search Software 4.0 Supports Multilingual Implementations, Including Non-Western Character Sets

Foster City, Calif., November 6, 2000 - Inktomi Corp. (NASDAQ: INKT), developer of scalable Internet infrastructure software, today announced the availability of Inktomi® Search Software 4.0, a proven search solution that provides multinational enterprises, region-specific portals and non-English language destination sites with a highly relevant, scalable search platform that is easy to install and maintain. Inktomi Search Software 4.0 enables the recognition of documents and provides full linguistic analysis and localization in most major world languages. This enables high quality search results across multilingual corporate intranets and public Web sites.

"The nature of the Internet is accelerating globalization, and many of our enterprise customers need to make their information accessible by all users, despite geographic and language barriers," said Troy Toman, general manager, Inktomi Search Solutions Division. "Inktomi Search Software 4.0 extends our existing strengths in scalability and ease of use to a worldwide audience by enabling high quality search performance in non-Western European languages."

Inktomi Search Software is a robust, scalable platform that powers the Inktomi Search/Site, Inktomi Search/Enterprise and Inktomi Search/Custom applications. Inktomi Search Software has been adopted by more than 2,000 enterprises, public Web sites, universities and government entities to provide search to their users. The product offering provides natural language search and topic hierarchy capabilities compatible with hundreds of file formats on corporate intranets, extranets and public sites. Version 4.0 adds the combination of full Unicode character encoding, language identification and language-specific lexical analysis to support the needs of global enterprises and destination sites.

Internationalization Support
Inktomi Search Software 4.0 allows users to search in whatever format they are most comfortable with, and still receive results relevant to their query, even if the document was created using a different character set.

Inktomi Search Software 4.0 internationalization features include:

Full Unicode Core: Takes full advantage of the Unicode 3.0 standard to provide for the normalization of encodings from major world languages to enhance the search and retrieval of documents in non-Western character sets. This allows users to issue a search query in their supported native language (by character set) and receive highly relevant results.

Linguistic Precision: Language identification and proper conversion to Unicode to eliminate incorrect retrieval of results based on character set overlap.

Improved Recall: On-the-fly results conversion to the user's character set, allowing review of documents relevant to the query regardless of the encoding used in the query or original document

Multilingual User Interface: Delivers a localized user interface including the query page, rotating tips, help screens and results pages available in major languages.

Inktomi Search Software Version 4.0 is available for download as part of Inktomi Search/Custom, Inktomi Search/Enterprise and Inktomi Search/Site immediately at http://www.inktomi.com/search/

About Inktomi Search Solutions
Inktomi Search Solutions, which has received broad acclaim for delivering comprehensive and highly accurate Web search results, powers many of the largest Internet portals and destination sites worldwide, as well as some of the largest, most demanding enterprise intranets. Inktomi provides a full range of search services and products from turnkey, hosted solutions to licensed software packages enabling customers to change their business model for providing search without having to change search engines. Inktomi Search Solutions also offers technology for building and maintaining topic hierarchies seamlessly integrated with search functionality, empowering Internet portals, destination sites and enterprises alike to provide their users with a highly efficient and satisfying way to find information.

About Inktomi
Based in Foster City, Calif., Inktomi develops and markets scalable infrastructure software that is essential to the Internet. Inktomi's business is divided into Network Products, comprised of industry leading solutions for network caching, content distribution, and media broadcasting; Search Solutions, providing search and content classification products and services to Internet portals, destination sites and enterprises; Commerce Engine, consisting of product search and merchandising services; and Wireless technologies. Inktomi customers and strategic partner base includes leading companies such as America Online, AT&T, British Telecommunications, Excite@Home, Intel, iWon.com, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Nokia, RealNetworks, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo! The company has offices in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information visit http://www.inktomi.com/.