6/26    Looks like, in the end, the Stanford guys stick together:
        Yahoo + Google.
        \_ but we always knew that Stanford was the Yale of the West, right?
           \_ what is that supposed to mean , exactly?  -yale grad student
              \_ go back to new haven, yalie.
        \_ Is Google really taht much better than Inktomi?
         \_ yes
         \_ yes.   go bears!
         \_ Did Yahoo drop Inktomi entirely?  Or just adding Google results
            as well?
            \_ I think they're still keeping Inktomi for some business-
               oriented stuff. But google will replace the main search engine.
        \_ DirectHit was doing some interesting stuff but either never went
           bigtime or is still a backend search engine data provider like
           Inktomi.  Or they're not in business?  They get search logs from
           the other search engine companies, grind em up, and then return
           results based on what links other folks have chosen in the past
           for previously seen queries.  Same family of idea as Google but
           not the same.  It has the same self-feeding problem Google has
           \_ explain again what was interesting about this?  -tom
           but a notch worse.  Anyone know if DH is still doing that?
           \_ DH's popularity-based search results weren't yielding top
              relevance. Additionally, they've been bought by AskJeeves,
              the anti-serach technology company, so. The ways that Google
              and Inktomi rank web pages is entirely different than click-
              and Inktomi rank web pages are entirely different than click-
              through gathering.                                -- Marco
                \_ DH and Google are the same in the sense that there's
                   user input into the rankings returned.  It's another
                   form of popularity search.  What's Inktomi doing these
                   days?
                   \_ Forgetting money losing search engines and going
                      after the higher-profit web caching market.
                   \_ I was not aware that google records clickthroughs.
                      AFAIK, both use variations of mapping the cross-links
                      on the Web and promoting pages they define to be
                      "popular" or "authoritative" based on number of
                      inbound and outbound links.  -- Marco