Google provided Yahoo’s search results from 2000 to 2004. During that partnership, Yahoo licensed Google’s web-search technology while it worked toward building an independent search system.
Yahoo began as a manually organized web directory created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, but its popularity eventually required more powerful crawling and indexing. In 2000, Yahoo Search began licensing results from Google, whose relevance-ranking technology was rapidly gaining recognition.
The arrangement ended as Yahoo expanded through acquisitions and internal development. Yahoo acquired Inktomi in late 2002, bought Overture in 2003, and combined technology from those businesses with its own crawler. In February 2004, Yahoo replaced Google’s results with results from Yahoo Search Technology.
A common mix-up is to answer Inktomi because it later became central to Yahoo’s search infrastructure. Inktomi was important to Yahoo after the Google period, but it was not the provider of Yahoo’s results from 2000 through 2004.