Inktomi Powers Advanced Information Indexing

SmartCrawl™ Technology Offers Turnkey Solution to Rapidly Index Web Site Content

Internet World, New York -- December 11, 1996 -- Inktomi Corporation today announced SmartCrawl, an advanced information indexing technology for streamlining data collection and access to the most current information on the World Wide Web. With the capacity to intelligently crawl more than 10 million documents per day, SmartCrawl indexes Web site content up to three times faster than any other technology available.

In the U.S., SmartCrawl will be integrated into HotBot (www.hotbot.com), the Wired search engine powered by Inktomi technology, in the first quarter of 1997. Inktomi's partners in the Australian/New Zealand and Japanese markets also plan to integrate SmartCrawl in their respective OzEmail and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) search sites in the second quarter of 1997.

"This technology represents the next generation of tools for indexing the exploding amount of Web information," said David Peterschmidt, Inktomi president and chief executive officer. "SmartCrawl shows how critical truly scalable technology is for harnessing the Web's power and mass. Static information and infrequent updating simply won't cut it anymore in today's business environment."

Unlike the data processing technologies embedded in most search sites that sporadically update information, SmartCrawl offers a turnkey solution whereby the entire process - from crawling, to information processing, to indexing - is automated, asynchronous and continuous. As a result, Internet solution providers can offer users the "freshest" Web information all the time, particularly in commercial search engine offerings.

Turnkey Solution

SmartCrawl's turnkey automation enables the company's global partners to deploy and operate the system quickly and at low cost. Inktomi's SmartCrawl system runs on a cluster of Intel Pentium® Pro processor-based servers, providing superior price-performance and manageability. The pervasive use of industry-standard building blocks also means that the system can be serviced or incrementally expanded with off-the-shelf parts.

"SmartCrawl combines the intelligence and power to solidify HotBot's position as the premier search engine for serious Internet users," said Andrew Anker, CEO of HotWired Inc., the interactive programming division of Wired Ventures, Inc. "The data currency and comprehensiveness afforded by SmartCrawl will drive new, compelling business and consumer uses for information served by HotBot."

Inktomi's Parallel Processing Technology

SmartCrawl comprises an integral part of Inktomi's parallel processing technology for powering server scalability and performance. That scalable suite is at the center of the continued development of the global Internet search infrastructure based on Inktomi's high-performance software. These services offer the world's largest and most advanced Web search databases, combining over 54 million documents with flexible region-specific features.

SmartCrawl is powered by Inktomi's proprietary software which incorporates advanced multithreading. This parallel processing technology provides extreme performance in a network-centric environment by allowing each processor to optimize and manage over 1,000 simultaneous network operations. This next-generation architecture insulates the system from delays or outages on individual portions of the network by maintaining a constant, steady stream of inbound data.

About Inktomi Corporation

Inktomi (www.inktomi.com) develops and markets high-performance networked information and infrastructure services and systems. These systems use parallel-processing technology across clusters of workstations to deliver the speed and performance characteristic of supercomputers, while utilizing smaller, less expensive workstations. Inktomi's linked search engines provide the backbone for an emerging global Internet infrastructure for quickly and cost-effectively searching, locating and managing information on the Internet and private intranets. The HotBot search engine was recently awarded the "Editor's Choice" distinction by PC Magazine and was cited as an "MVP Finalist" by PC Computing magazine.

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