Yahoo-oo
: So Yahoo buys Inktomi. Says George Mannes at The Street:
Yahoo!, conceivably, could use Inktomi to replace all or part of the search results it receives from Google. On the other hand, Microsoft, whose MSN portal competes with Yahoo!, may not be interested in using Inktomi’s technology once it’s acquired by Yahoo!, giving Google an opportunity to take Inktomi’s place on MSN. Inktomi, which was a pioneer in automated Web search technology, has seen its prominence overshadowed by that of Google and its own formulas for finding relevant search results for Internet users.
On the one hand, Yahoo gets a search engine cheap. On the other hand, it gets the also-ran search engine that is clearly behind Google in quality and acceptance.