In 1998, when you searched on Yahoo, the results came from a company most people had never heard of. Inktomi, named for a trickster spider in Lakota legend, grew out of research at UC Berkeley and ran search for Yahoo, HotBot and others. Its 31-year-old chief scientist, Eric Brewer, built it on clusters of ordinary computers. When it filed to go public, Inktomi was selling the plumbing of the web to the brands people saw.

A Spider From Berkeley

Brewer and his graduate student Paul Gauthier founded Inktomi in February 1996 to turn their research into a business. Their idea was that many cheap workstations, tied together, could index the web faster than one giant machine. Inktomi kept its own name off the screen. It licensed search to portals and sold Traffic Server, software that cached web pages close to users. Revenue for the six months to March 1998 was $5.9 million.

Peak, Crash, Yahoo

Inktomi priced at $18 a share in June 1998 and traded on Nasdaq as INKT. The stock rose with the bubble as portals and phone carriers bought its search and caching software. The crash hit those customers hard. In 2000 Yahoo moved its web search to a young company called Google. Yahoo came back for Inktomi itself in 2003, buying it for about $235 million.

Cover: The Earth Spider Slain by Brave Samurai Watanabe no Tauna (center image), Katsukawa Shunsho. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a giant spider (the Lakota trickster Iktomi).