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LOS ANGLELES -- If you've ever searched for "foot and mouth" at sites such as America Online or HotBot, you probably received more information on podiatry than the cow disease you were actually looking for.

Inktomi hopes to improve that tricky little problem. The company, which provides search engines to popular portals, announced at Spring Internet World here Wednesday a major upgrade to its search technology. And according to Inktomi, you should notice the changes right away.

Inktomi customers such as AOL, MSN, NBCi, HotBot, and iWon have all rolled out the new search service on their sites.

Seek and Find

Over the last two years, the company has worked on how it does relevance searches using a small editorial team that reviews search results each day, says Troy Toman, vice president and general manager of search at Inktomi.

"We wanted to make search more accurate and more flexible," he says.

With today's new release--its biggest in four years--Inktomi improves its search engine in two key areas: name relationship and news topic integration, Toman says.

In the past, name searches often scored results by the number of times one or both names appeared anywhere within the text, Toman says. "A search under my name would get a bunch of articles on Troy Aikman, and some on another guy name Toman."

With the new technology, Inktomi's engine recognizes that the two names together are more relevant than one or both occurring multiple times within a page, he says.

"Paris, France should actually mean something together," Toman says.

Inktomi also improved the way it incorporates news stories into its engine, he says. Before, the company would go out every 30 days and refresh the Web by adding new pages and articles into the index, he says. But news happens much more quickly than that.

Now Inktomi works with news providers to make sure updates appear on a daily basis, Toman adds.

So, instead of numerous listings on podiatry, a query on "foot and mouth" should produce results on the cow disease. The Inktomi engine now recognizes that the two words belong together--thanks in part to all the recent news coverage on the topic.

Combining Search Into One List

Besides improving its own search engine, Inktomi is working with its customers, such as MSN, to provide search results in a single list rather than one divided into MSN categories. Today when you do a search at AOL or MSN, you get content from their directories on top followed by Inktomi results.

"We want to provide a uniform list of the top 10 most relevant results," Toman says.

Sometimes some of the Inktomi results are more relevant, Toman says.

"At MSN, we're going to blend the MSN directory with Inktomi results so you get the most relevant first, and avoid duplication," he says.

Inktomi is also working to make search more personal, with an eye toward mobile devices.

"If I do a search for restaurants from my cell phone in New York, I'm going to want different results than if I were to search from my office in California," Toman says.

Inktomi's update comes at a time when the search engine has faced increased competition from one-time upstart Google. Last summer, Yahoo replaced its Inktomi search engine with Google's, which promised faster searches.

Inktomi's new search software offers as good or better relevance than competitors, Toman says.

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