The acquisition will extend Inktomi's search capabilities from the general Internet market to the enterprise information portal market, officials said.
"This fills a big gap for us in terms of [Inktomi's] 'search everywhere' [strategy]," said Troy Toman, director of business development for Inktomi Search and Directory. "If there's networked information out there, we want to make all that available so people can find whatever they need."
Because corporate intranets and extranets have become a critical part of business as large document repositories, "enterprises are starting to run into the same scalability problems that Internet sites were seeing years ago," Toman said. "Inktomi sees an opportunity to solve some of the same problems behind the firewall" and enable users of extranets and intranets to obtain more relevant search results.
Portals and destination sites such as America Online, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN.com and Lycos use Inktomi's search engine, which can search 500 million documents on the Web, Inktomi officials said.
Ultraseek, originally part of InfoSeek, provides scalable and customisable search and navigation software to 1,500 companies, education and government institutions, and other public entities for their intranet and extranet sites.
"Our strategy is to achieve leadership status in entertainment, leisure and recreation, and Ultraseek doesn't fit into that sequence," said Eric Handler, a spokesman for GO.com, "We unloaded it in hopes of concentrating more on our core competencies."
Handler said GO.com will license Ultraseek from Inktomi for its Internet and intranet sites, including ESPN.com and Disney.com, but he didn't specify what the license fee will be.
The acquisition is expected to be finalised in September.
