In August 1999, AOL NetFind switched from using Excite to Inktomi. Meanwhile, MSN Web Search which originally used Inktomi, moved to AltaVista in September 1999 and then back to Inktomi in December 1999. Yahoo which switched from AltaVista to Inktomi now uses Google. Since each Inktomi partners chooses their own options and parameters, the end results for the searcher is that different results and search features are available on each. MSN Search MSN Advanced Search has one of the largest Inktomi databases and has some search features that none of the others yet have.
Users can choose to limit to one record per domain or turn site clustering off.
And Microsoft Internet Explorer users can select and save search results. Inktomi also offers a directory engine and a shopping engine. Both of these used to be available on iWon , but now only the shopping search engine is. In January 2000, they released information on their WebMap database of over one billion documents. The WebMap database is not available for searching, nor do any Inktomi partners offer direct searching of those one billion records.