A day after announcing that America Online has licensed its search engine for use across its services, Inktomi announced a private-label service that will give portals and destinations sites a fast way to add a directory service to their search services.

The new Directory Engine is based on "intelligence" that automatically searches for, finds and organizes high-quality documents into a directory that allows users to search the Web by topic. Inktomi's Concept Induction technology, developed over the past 18 months, relies in part on the number of links pointing to a particular page to find the most current and relevant content, according to Inktomi Chief Technology Officer Paul Gauthier.

With the technology, Inktomi says it was able to build over the past two months with a team of about 10 editors "the Web's largest categorized directory," containing more than 1.3 million documents. Inktomi customers, Gauthier said, will be able to customize the Inktomi Master Directory by having their own editorial teams add or delete categories and change the way users navigate through the directory. At the same time, vertical portals will be able to build topic-specific directories containing only those topics of interest to their users.

"We wanted to combine the goodness of human classification with some heavy technology," Gauthier said, referring to existing directories created by LookSmart, Netscape Communications and Yahoo!.

"Traditionally, directories have been built by humans. Our goal is not to replace humans," he said. "With the Directory Engine, humans become the high-skilled editorial component, picking the categories and designing the hierarchy. Then they put documents within each category that typifies it. The engine goes out and populates the categories - brute-forcing a lot of the manual labor that goes into building a directory."

The Directory Engine also is designed to work with Inktomi's Shopping Engine; portals can set up a customized shopping directory that is based on the 3 million products contained within the engine.

The new Concept Induction technology, meanwhile, enables Inktomi's directory, search and shopping engines to perform smarter keyword searches. Users who type in a general search for the word "chips," for example, would be prompted to refine their search by specifying whether they were interested in topics such as "computer chips," "poker chips" or "potato chips."

As with its other search and shopping engines, Inktomi said it expects to earn revenue from its Directory Engine on a per-query fee basis. Among the early takers: GoNow.com, GoProfit.com and VerticalNet.

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