Inktomi buys into e-commerce: Infrastructure specialist takes C2B's on-line/off-line shopping agent

Inktomi and C2B don't want to be the biggest store in the Internet shopping mall. In fact, they don't want to sell anything. They'll just work the information booth and draw the "You Are Here" maps.

Web infrastructure supplier Inktomi- known for search engines and traffic caches-agreed earlier this month to acquire shopping agent C2B for about 1.8 million shares of Inktomi stock and plans to combine its product-seeking powers with Inktomi's Web-sifting technology. The result will be a revved-up engine that responds to questions by turning up not only a product in a specified price range but performance reviews, user comments, related articles from consumer magazines and driving directions to the nearest store that sells the item.

"C2B has mapped out a vision not just of a price club but of a whole on-line shopping experience," says Kevin Brown, Inktomi's director of marketing. "And we know a lot about the Internet from our Web search business. If we can apply that data to this experience, that's a pretty important differentiation in a crowded market."

The C2B engine has three moving parts. The basic product locator inventories 170 merchants in 12 categories-460,000 products in all, said C2B co-founder Scott Walchek. Unlike other shopping agents, C2B doesn't stick to on-line retailers but grabs product information from auction sites, classifieds and local merchants.

Brand-name content providers such as Consumer's Digest supply best-buy information on top of the product identification layer, the second part of the engine. The third part is the "shopping assistant," which asks lifestyle questions and where customers identify what they need. "C2B offers a set of questions based on what you don't know," Brown says. "On the other hand, you can be at the highest level of the search tree and say, 'Find me the lightest road bicycle with a composite frame for under $3000,' and you'll get it."

Strategically, the linking of Inktomi and C2B seems natural. When Excite bought NetBot last year and Amazon.com bought shopping agent Junglee in August, C2B decided the time was right for an alliance that would give it access to capital and growth opportunities. Inktomi and C2B use similar business models, licensing their open-standards technology as OEMs. They're even located near each other in San Mateo, Calif.

Inktomi also brings a dedication to scalability-an important consideration when adding a merchant to the C2B database means adding that merchant's entire product inventory. Prices must be kept up-to-date, and beginning in November, C2B will list product availability and shipping costs.

Other agents get this information submitted by merchants and charge them for posting it. C2B uses spidering search technology to acquire the data directly from merchants' sites. Soon to come are real-time drivers that will update information from heavily trafficked sites such as CDnow and Amazon.com.

The plan now is to roll out a combined Inktomi-C2B product that can be licensed to and possibly customized for Web portals. Although it will have all the feature capabilities, from the shopping agent to Inktomi's real-English search tree, Web hosts decide how many of those abilities they wish to deploy.

It's also decision time for large Web hosts that use search engines powered by Inktomi but shopping engines from someone else. " Many of the big portals have already committed, so unless the product they arrive at is something very out of the ordinary and easy on the hosts, they may find a tight market," said Dan Feralla, an electronic commerce analyst with Pelka Brown and Overley.

Such predictions don't worry Inktomi or C2B. The portal market's expansion will continue to provide plenty of opportunity, Walchek said. "Many of these Web sites began as tech companies but are now positioning themselves as media companies. They're much more attentive now to media positioning and brand identity. We can fill that gap and maintain the technical side on an outsourced basis."

Inktomi is happy to supply search engines, shopping agents, network caches in any combination that a Web host wants, Brown said. "We're working with a Who's Who of the biggest companies. And that means whoever wins, we've got it covered. We'll continue to be in business."

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