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The Teoma home page [teoma.com] now redirects to search.ask.com [search.ask.com].
Shame, as I quite liked the distinction between the two and the seperate identities; as part of a drive to increase awareness of Ask being a genuine search engine, rather than a quirky query tool, I can understand the reasoning behing the move though.
R.
The new Ask.com features a slick, do-it-yourself toolbox that helps users refine more types of searches with the first click of their computer mouse for maps, images, dictionaries, weather, local info or documents stored on their computers.
possible birth of google competator...
Nah..just an adjustment so they can release some gas
lol
I was just reading an article that featured the CEO of InterActiveCorp, Barry Diller, regarding his plans for Ask.com. He thinks the Ask.com technology is superior to googles, and demonstrated by asking the Money Magazine editor to type in "Weather in Minneapolis (or any other city) in google, you basically get some generic reponses. In Ask.com, you get a specific response (the weather + forecast).
Essentially he is talking about Smart-Answer technology, getting an answer to something directly rather than a list of page results.
I've only had a brief check of the results but for the sort of music searches I do it is possibly even better than Yahoo - which means it is well ahead of Google. Re-running some of the Technical searches I've been doing today, it's not as good as Google (those supplementary pages in Google are great for finding old forum answers).
I like the thumbnails of pages (the binoculars icon below the page listing).
Matt
iIn Ask, I get only the current info on top, followed by a news station website (ack!), then the same authority/resource website.
Smart what?
After all these years of Teoma still ranking my .NET domain which was 301 redirected years ago when I bought the .COM, they finally FIXED IT (was still broke last week) and my .COM finally shows up in their SERPs now instead of that stupid .NET.
Maybe this is a sign they're gonna clean up some other stuff as well.
I liked Jeeves.
I bet they didn't even give him a gold watch for his years of service. No sign of him anywhere, other than a "Where's Jeeves" notice on "Ask for kids."
If you search for "where's jeeves," you get several entries from the old "Ask Jeeves" that are 404, although a news article from another site does give a link to Jeeves' retirement page.
Shame on Teoma. Just like any major corporation, they just use you and suck the life out of you and then lay you off once they've got the traffic they want.
I hope Jeeves at least got some good stock options or 401K or something out of the deal.
JK
The Chief of State of Canada is Queen Elizabeth II, represented by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, and the Head of State is Prime Minister Paul Martin
Well, one out of 3 ain't bad...
Jeeves (oops, I mean "Ask") cites cia.gov as their reference, and they have it right.
So, will my AJ swag be worth something someday?
The only reason it is still around is because they fired everyone (not me, I'm not bitter about anything - it was all very very interesting) and put ads everywhere. Because of their branding people still went to their site.
However, the business has serious fatal flaws - most of which is a bad product.
Teoma is based on some convuluted idea of ranking sites by grouping them into groups and then taking a picture of those groups. It really is nothing special and the search engine isn't finding sites that other search engines are or doing anything special.
Its value is in the number of people that still go to the site because of its brand name. Now that the old butler is gone, and the Teoma brand, it will be interesting to see how they are going to keep getting people coming back.
They've been saying good show and fare thee well to Jeeves for a while. Even has a cutsey screen where you could read a buhbye note, see a card and other clap trap (I can't believe (a) I know this and (b) I admit it. I need a life, sheesh)
We are #1, #2, and #4 on there for the most popular search terms...
Is your daily traffic from Ask measured in thousands?
Is your daily traffic from Ask measured in thousands?
This misses the point. Ask seems to have built a nice interface from which they can continue to grow and they will. And so will MSN and so will Yahoo, etc., etc.
Capitilism has a way of always leveling the playing field and we are witnessing it in action.
Is your daily traffic from Ask measured in thousands?
This misses the point. Ask seems to have built a nice interface from which they can continue to grow and they will. And so will MSN and so will Yahoo, etc., etc.
Capitalism has a way of always leveling the playing field and we are witnessing it in action.
Ask is very capable of giving better SERPS to serious sites due to it's college student's level of crawling the web. It does suffer from some serious strike outs (such as associating my site with farm lessons? What the!?) which needs to be ironed out perhaps with more crawling in shorter periods.
True; there are some flaws and improvements that Ask should implement or fix.
False; Ask is still very relevant these days.
It's the underdog of search engines and if it's real improvements continue with (my perception of) it's good or at least decent marketing it's future may see some serious gains in the market share.
Actually looking further it seemes that the cached pages are only on some sites - maybe that's something that they're introducing bit by bit as they crawl?
On Bloomberg it said that Ask.com will be an alternative to Google just as Fox was to the three main networks when launched. It is looking for a 10-15% market share within 2-3 years (6-7% now).
Fox had sassy shows and right-wing news coverage to draw market share away from the mainstream networks. Unless Ask can replace Jeeves with Homer Simpson or Bill O'Reilly, it's going to be like a new librarian trying to win patrons away from another (and much more popular) librarian.
Fox had sassy shows and right-wing news coverage to draw market share away from the mainstream networks. Unless Ask can replace Jeeves with Homer Simpson or Bill O'Reilly, it's going to be like a new librarian trying to win patrons away from another (and much more popular) librarian.
Ask can do the same by simply returning different results. For many broad searches there are a whole host of websites that would be eligible for p.1 of an engine's SERPS (not just 10). Maybe they should ensure that they serve different, yet still relevant, results to Google.
People will try Ask if they think it's unique and can find stuff Google can't (even if G has found the sites but stuck them on page 2/3/4.)
I have had the Teoma toolbar installed on IE for about a year and a half. Now with this change, whenever I use the toolbar, I get to as Ask.com page that says "This page cannot be displayed at the current time. Please double check the Web address and try again."
I don't know why they couldn't fix this.
