It bought several rival search technologies, including AltaVista and Inktomi, which its engineers souped up.
Victory will go to the providers that save their customers time--Broadcom, Amazon.com, Inktomi, etc.
Gilder generally avoids software, but I've always regarded Inktomi's software search engine as the beating pulse of the Net.
The catch: Inktomi was required to keep its profits at a certain level.
Ask Jeeves says that puts the company third behind Google and Inktomi.
Safeguard Scientifics, i2 Technologies and Merrill Lynch's Internet Infrastructure trust, which includes companies such as VeriSign and Inktomi, round out Jehangir's Internet exposure.
Foster City, California-based Inktomi, the Internet software provider, regularly throws parties not to launch new products but to be seen and heard from.
The synthetic lease allowed Inktomi to keep the mortgage debt off its balance sheet, even though for tax purposes it owned the building.
Silver lining: The deal helped put Inktomi in shape to be acquired by Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ).
To be sure, Semel presided over a long list of successful deals with Internet companies during his tenure, including key acquisitions like Inktomi and Overture, which provided Yahoo!
Just two years later FastForward was acquired by Inktomi Corporation.
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When its profitability dipped last summer, according to its SEC filings, Inktomi was forced to exercise a purchase option--in essence to repay Deutsche Bank for the loan on the building.
Joe Frost, a spokesman for search firm Inktomi, said it helped many firms catalogue the information found on their internal servers, but none so far had extended this to individual PCs.
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