What's the scoop on Inktomi? I just got off the phone with Daniel Brandt, anti-Google agitator and founder of
Google-Watch.org. His media focus is Google, but he follows search engines closely and had a few thoughts to share about Inktomi.
Flaketomi? Inktomi, he says, has long had a reputation for flakiness - their crawler's often on autopilot, crawling sites without listing them in the index. There's even some guff in WebMasterWorld about people who have paid for listings but still don't show up in the results.
Inktomi Dropping Pages. In addition, he's had 40 - 50,000 listings recently dropped from Inktomi. His main site, namebase.org, is a resource on political figures. While about 300 or so listings remain, this drop could point to a reduction in resources allocated to the index, or a change in how they handle single sites with thousands of pages.
He had not heard of Inktomi doing this with any other sites.
Yahoo! Already Delivering Inktomi Results. He noted that several people, again in WebMasterWorld, have found Yahoo! sometimes delivering Inktomi results. They're selectively testing Inktomi there at Yahoo!, so all you reverse engineers out there should watch closely and post when you figure out what's going on... :)