Inktomi Launches Shopping Engine

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March 17, 1999 (5:51 AM EST)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Hoping to capitalize on the rise of e-commerce, Inktomi announced Tuesday that it is launching a new service called the Inktomi Shopping Engine.

The service lets customers search for products by name or keyword. Once a user finds a product, it will allow them to price shop between different e-commerce sites. It will also offer them pictures of products and links directly to product pages on merchant sites.

Fifteen of Inktomi's search customers began using a trial version of the software on Tuesday. This includes major portal sites such as Go Network, Snap, and GeoCities, as well as content providers such as Fox Sports News and CNNfn.

The service catalogs the goods of more than 300 online merchants offering more than 1 million products. These will be divided by 14 categories, including apparel and jewelry, books and magazines, computer software, music, and sporting goods.

Inktomi is the leading provider of search services for Web portals and other companies. It has been aggressively adding new features in recent months. This was highlighted by its deal with Centraal in January. It will begin offering Centraal's RealNames service when the new version of its search services comes out next month.

With the Shopping Engine, Inktomi stands to make revenue two different ways, said Kevin Brown, director of marketing at Inktomi. First, it will share in revenue from ad page views generated on portal sites when customer use the service. Secondly, the merchants all have contracts to pay Inktomi when it delivers them a paying customer. The rates will vary between different sorts of items, Brown said, depending on the cost and profit margin. Most commissions will fall between 5 percent and 20 percent.

Brown said many people use the Web for comparison shopping, and then buy offline or in a different Web session.

"There will be some leakage," Brown said. "We will get paid either way. We get paid more if they buy through our engine."

The final version of the product will include greater tracking functions, Brown said. For instance, he said, it may include functions that will track a customer who uses the service, then bookmarks a page and buys a product from it in a later session.

As the number of retailers, products, and shoppers grows exponentially, Brown said, buying goods online will more and more involve searching through large volumes of information. It will require similar technology to that used to search the Web. For small e-merchants, he added, contracting through the Shopping Engine can be a good way to reach customers who otherwise might not have heard of them.