Robert_Charlton - 2:55 am on Jun 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

Not sure how new this information is, but there seems to be some talk in this forum about the MSN bot, at any rate....

I had a conversation with an unspecified Inktomi marketing exec at AdTech San Francisco today, and asked him about the MSN spider and about when we'll see Inktomi results on Yahoo. He knew I was going to be posting this. I hope I haven't misrepresented what he said...

- About Yahoo, he said that Inktomi would be going "live on Yahoo in the unspecified future," but wouldn't get more exact than that, except to say that "Inktomi is already live on Yahoo in some countries now."

- About the MSN spider, he felt that anybody could send out a spider, but building a full-scale engine is harder than that, and that it would be "18 months at least before MSN could go live with their own crawler based engine."

So, I'm guessing, there's going to be a chunk of time when Inktomi is powering two big portals and Inktomi results are going to be very significant.

I've posted some additional comments about Inktomi paid and free crawl in the Supporters Forum.... Join now. ;)