Parallel Universe
SAN FRANCISCO — The World Wide Web--that infinitely interconnected constellation of computers--has no center. But something close to it lives in a nondescript low-rise office building in Santa Clara, Calif.
Inside a 20-foot-square wire cage surrounded by guards and security cameras sit rows of floor-to-ceiling racks holding about 200 workstation computers that power one of the Web's most widely used technologies: search services provided by Inktomi Corp.
Inktomi (pronounced INK-tuh-me), named after the Lakota Indian legend about a crafty spider that defeats larger enemies with cunning, toils in relative obscurity while powering many of the most popular destinations on the Web. Yahoo, CNet, America Online's ICQ chat service, GeoCities and HotBot have made the 300-employee San Mateo, Calif.-based company's search, or traffic acceleration technology, critical to most Web surfers' experience.
Eric Brewer, co-founder and chief scientist, recently stood in that cage and laughed in wonder, loud enough to be heard above the steady whir of hundreds of cooling fans. "If you told me that we'd be doing this three years ago," he said, "I don't know if I would have believed it."
It does seem hard to fathom. Each day the computer cluster--one of four run by Inktomi--fields tens of millions of queries from Web users. For each query, Inktomi's search engine scours every word on more than 110 million Web pages and responds with a list of results in a quarter of a second or less.
In a mere three years, Brewer's company has become a top provider of Internet management technology and one of the market's hottest stocks since going public at $18 a share last summer. It closed down 69 cents Friday at $118.50 on Nasdaq, for a market valuation of about $5.8 billion.
In the process, Brewer and co-founder Paul Gauthier have joined the ranks of Silicon Valley's overnight super-rich. Not bad for a company yet to earn its first nickel in profit.
"They've got something that's real, a product that people use. It's a value proposition today. That's why their stock holds up, regardless of revenues," which are rapidly growing but still modest, said analyst Jim Balderston of Zona Research in Redwood City, Calif.
Inktomi's search engine provides the underlying technology that major Web sites customize and brand. Because the company doesn't operate a "destination" site--as do search engine developers AltaVista and Excite--it doesn't compete against potential customers and can position itself as a technological Switzerland in the portal wars.
