Inktomi Is Owned by Yahoo!— Though HotBot Is Owned by Terra Lycos

That’s right, Inktomi is yet another search engine that is now owned by the
Yahoo! megalith. (Yahoo! made this acquisition in early 2003.)
By this point, you’re probably thinking that Yahoo! owns all the searchs on the
Web. It sure seems that way. Here’s a list of the search services that Yahoo! has
acquired over the past year or so:
Inktomi (which powers HotBot)
Overture (which provides paid search listings—and which previously
acquired AllTheWeb and AltaVista)
AllTheWeb
AltaVista
Interestingly, even though Yahoo! owns all of these search engines, they each
operate independently. So if you search HotBot (which is powered by Inktomi),
you get different results than if you search AllTheWeb or AltaVista.
Also interestingly, Yahoo! does not use any of the search engines it owns to
power the search results on its own Web site. It uses Google for that. (Why?
Because they had a contract before Yahoo! went on its acquisition spree.)
So who’s left to compete with the Yahoo!/Inktomi/Overture/AllTheWeb/
AltaVista combination? Well, there’s Google, of course (and it competes quite
well, thank you). There’s also Ask Jeeves, which owns the Teoma search