I had a 'relationship' of sorts with Inktomi for 18 months after they had a
demo/stand at a JUSW, the software is impressive but the sales person was
not! It took ages to get answers to queries etc. It is very expensive and
we decided in the end for the time being to go with Google and HT Dig. The
idea of having it really tailored to suit was great because it was so easy
compared with HT Dig and of course Google which you have no control over at
all if you don't pay. However it took so long and got so convoluted with
Inktomi  (and staff here I have to say) that I gave up. Hopefully they have
improved their service to prospective customers.

Time span was 8 the January 2000  and 67 emails later to 5 February 2002 so
it was longer than I thought!

Be very interested to hear how you get on

Sally Justice


At 09:37 10/09/2002 +0000, Brian Kelly wrote:
>A sales rep from Inktomi is coming to see me on Friday.  I know that the
>Inktomi (nee Ultraseek) search engine is used by a small but growing
>number of Universities and that those that do use it seem to like it.
>
>I'd be interested to hear from those who do use it - how good is it; is
>it worth paying for an (expensive?) licensed product when there are open
>source tools such as ht://Dig; are you using any of the advanced
>facilities (e.g. indexing structured metadata, using the APIs, ...);
>have you had any problems with it; etc.
>
>A summary of the meeting is given below.  Rather sales-oriented, but the
>statistic that Inktomi is used by 9 out of the top 10 US Universities is
>interesting.
>
>Ta
>
>Brian
>
> > Here are my aims for the meeting:
> >
> > 1) Make you and your colleagues aware of Inktomi's current search
> > offerings
> > 2) Position Inktomi in the search market
> > 3) Talk about the future on Inktomi/search on a network/internet.
> >
> > Here is a rough outline about Inktomi and its search technology:
> >
> > Inktomi are market leaders in Internet/Intranet search. Companies like
>
> > Nokia, Ericsson, Sun, HP, Schlumberger, and Reuters have recently
> > standardized on Inktomi Search Software as their underlying knowledge
> > retrieval platform. Add this to the fact that 9 out of the top 10 U.S.
>
> > Universities also use Inktomi as their preferred search engine and I'm
>
> > sure you will agree that Inktomi is the best search engine for
> > Education Networks. In addition to providing the
> > highest-quality search results, these customers tell us that
> > Inktomi Search Software is the only product that can scale
> > to the demands of their global enterprises, is extensible
> > with the ability to effectively retrieve and blend both
> > unstructured and structured (databases, content management systems,
> > etc.) data, and is the easiest application to deploy and maintain.
> >
> > What makes us stand out among search engines?
> >
> > .     Natural language search
> > .     Completely customisable
> > .     Scalable to millions of documents
> > .     Optimised relevance ranking
> > .     Easy to install and administer (browser-based)
> >
> > Here a re a few links that relate to Inkotmi:
> >
> > Search Products
> > http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/
> >
> > Inktomi Enterprise Search named "Network Computing - Well Connected
> > Award": http://www.networkcomputing.com/1210/1210f116.html#searcheng
> >
> > Sample of Inktomi Enterprise Search - Customers
> > http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/customers/sites.html
> >
> > Evaluation Copy Download
> > http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/download/download.htm
> >
> > Our Support offerings:
> > http://support.inktomi.com/Offerings/offerings-search.html
> >
> > IES Overview:
> > http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/
> >
> > IES Modules:
> > http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/products/modules/index.html
> >
> > Product datasheets: http://www.inktomi.com/showme/collateral.html
> >
> > Java API:
> > http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/products/xpa/index.html
> >
> > Release Notes of latest version:
> >
>http://support.inktomi.com/products/search/support/docs/relnotes/relnote
>s-4-
>
>
>---------------------------------------
>Brian Kelly
>UK Web Focus
>UKOLN
>University of Bath
>BATH
>BA2 7AY
>Email: [log in to unmask]
>Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
>Phone: 01225 38 3943