Inktomi were acquired by Yahoo in December 2002, with the deal being finalised in March 2003. More recently, Yahoo have also acquired Overture, following Overtures acquisition of AltaVista, and the web-search unit of FAST (the originators of the alltehweb.com search engine). This leaves the newly expanded Yahoo Group as the only serious competitor to Google in the free, crawled search results arena.

Their ownership of the Overture web property also makes them the largest supplier of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) results in the world. Once they have finished integrating all of their web search purchases, they may well also be in a position to challenge Google seriously for the title of "Biggest Free Search Engine".

Inktomi results are being supplied to a number of search engines right now. The largest of these is currently MSN. This is unlikely to continue over the long term, as MSN view Yahoo as a direct competitor, and have recently begun the process of building their own free crawled results database, and recruiting experienced search engine staff.