Inktomi's core technology was born out of US DARPA funded research on massively paralleled systems. The company's original focus was on large scale Internet search, providing private-labeled search services to some of the world's best known search engines including Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and others. Inktomi later introduced high-end network cacheing software, sold primarily to telecom and internet service providers, to dramatically improve the performance of web-based network traffic.
Inktomi Corp. was acquired by Yahoo! for $235 million in 2003.