teoma - what do we know?

[rcjordan]

I've seen requests for spider info, but not much else, maybe I missed it. I like their SERPs, they seem somewhere between Fast and AV to me. Teoma is registered by Hawk Holdings. Digging through whois and about pages, here's what I particularly like:

Hawk is a holding company that was formed as a strategic alliance between Qwest Communications International and Baxter Investments. Hawk focuses on financing emerging technology infrastructure and services companies.

Qwest was one of the heaviest referrers to my site on the NBCi co-branded pages.

[Mike_Mackin]

Qwest

"Qwest Communications is a global leader in Broadband Internet-based communications. With one of the largest, most technologically advanced networks in the world, Qwest is powering the exchange of multimedia content - images, data and voice."

[qwest.com...]
[qwest.com...]

Convergence: The Big BANG ?

[jeremy goodrich]

As Littleman pointed out in another thread, and I went looking afterwards, they do not have a submit url form.

And from initial digging into their db, they don't have too many pages indexed. Also from the other thread, they seem to be running on Apache/*nix.

Around for about a year now, launched their search service in the last month or so, spider a site like crazy, which reminds me something of fast/google.

Results wise, I don't know where they get their relevancy ideas but I do like what they have for the trial searches I've run through their system.

Wisenut, for example, has a techie from Stanford. So does/did Google, Yahoo, etc. Where is the academic tie in for Teoma? This has been bugging me for quite some time.

In my experience, academics who get degrees, especially from top teir ivy league schools like Stanford, love to share with others about what school gave them their pretty piece of paper. So which school helped out with Teoma?

[Mike_Mackin]

Stanford, located in California, stands alone in SE stuff.
[yale.edu...]

[rcjordan]

>Results wise, I don't know where they get their relevancy ideas but I do like what they have for the trial searches I've run through their system.

Ditto. On my trials, the SERPs were good-to-excellent for T30. The database was small, but not bad for a start; 47,000 when Google shows something like 150,000.

[startup]

I believe it is Rutgers U.

[minnapple]

"Qwest Communications is a global leader in Broadband Internet-based communications. With one of the largest, most technologically advanced networks in the world, Qwest is powering the exchange of multimedia content - images, data and voice."

Qwest is my local Tele and ISP provider.

The have me listed under Air Conditioner Repair in their Yellow Pages.

Confused? Yep, so was I!

I did not pay for it so its a free listing, but not very targeted. :)

[Brett_Tabke]

Qwest is definatly one of the bigger players on the net. Their name pop up in most any conversation about the net. Look around, they have their hands into everything.

[jeremy goodrich]

When last talking about TEOMA,

"I believe it is Rutgers U."

Do you have any data to back that up startup? I heard some rumor of that before here, but I haven't seen one solid connection yet.

[msgraph]

Teoma Technologies, Piscataway, NJ, 7/00–current: Consultant. Participating in the construction of a next generation web search engine.

www.cs.rutgers.edu/~tdnguyen/CV.html

[rcjordan]

I'm liking this more and more.

BTW, QWest had (has?) the highest paying affiliate yellow page search box. Add that to their 'web aggressiveness' factor.

<added>
OK, who's Baxter Investments? Are they heavy-money VCs?

[msgraph]

Here's the really good news ;)

"Teoma's search technology is unlike anything available in the market today," said Scott Baxter, CEO of Hawk Holdings. "Teoma is the only search technology designed from the ground-up to scale both in accuracy and speed with the growth of the Internet. It incorporates the latest breakthroughs in parametric and parallel processing algorithms, which provide unmatched accuracy, speed and relevancy. Our technology, developed with Rutgers University, represents a paradigm shift in the search marketplace by solving the practical problem associated with Internet search, namely the continuing exponential growth of the Internet. Burdened by the burgeoning number of Web pages, and the increasing sophistication of spammers who routinely sabotage search results, existing search engines will continue to fail. From an engineering perspective and from a user perspective, our unique search logic breaks down the barriers associated with legacy search technology and simply outperforms the competition." The Teoma search technology provides:

High quality, relevant results -- Based upon its parametric search technology, a Teoma powered search will deliver a list of superior quality Websites with a high degree of relevancy to the search topic. As opposed to traditional text or popularity based search engines, Teoma's technology analyzes multiple parameters such as text, link structure, popularity and status to determine the ranking and relevancy of a site.

Fast access -- Teoma will deliver these high quality comprehensive results in less time than many of today's conventional search services. This speed is based on Teoma's distributed and parallel processing techniques, as well as reduced modeling algorithms, implemented in its search engine and deployed on a scalable efficient hardware architecture.

Breadth and depth of content -- Teoma will directly index hundreds of millions of Web pages to develop one of the largest search databases available. In addition, Teoma's unique ability to identify and rank directory link pages dramatically expands a user's view of the Internet.

[tgc.com...]

[seth_wilde]

Qwest acquired US West(120-year old telecom giant that served 14 states throughout the West) about a year ago, along with a near monopoly of the dsl & telphone services in denver they also have their name in bright blue letters across two of the biggest sky scrapers in town. They're notorious around here for their lack of customer service and have been getting a lot of play on local TV because of this.

[rcjordan]

From an email yesterday re their yellow page affiliate program

Help Local Businesses Gain Customers
We want to bring more exposure to the local businesses in our region, and we'll pay you to help us do this. Because of this goal, we prefer web sites focused within the Qwest 14-state service region, or which attract people visiting or moving to the region. The service region includes Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

[jeremy goodrich]

Can you believe, in Eugene, Oregon, it cost me, a year ago, .35 cents to make a local call at a Qwest owned pay phone?

And in New York, even with Verizon being the company here, the local coin calls only cost .25 to make. Now doesn't it seem a little odd, in a place where salaries are twice that of Oregon, that the phone calls are .10 cents more in the cheaper state? It would make more sense to have the expensive local call in the state where people make more money :) My .10 cents ;)

Point is, I have had ahem, thoughts about how good it was, before US West became Qwest, when the company wasn't Qwest. However, I believe it is interesting to note that they have they hands into the fast search engine [alltheweb.com] and also the up and coming Teoma's beta search [teoma.com].

As they seem to be a telecommunications provider developing deeper and deeper ties with the future of search technology, as Teoma is an up and coming engine, it concerns me that they might have poor customer service. Sort of puts a damper on my enthusiasm...in a way.

[rcjordan]

I deliver a good number of pageviews for a yellow page merchant. When you follow the clickthru on some of the major YP categories, such as "hotels & motels" you will see some very traditional advertising names. Names we still do not see in banners and skyscrapers. I've always had the suspicion that a search engine like Teoma could really be a mechanism to deliver their yellow page ads.

[IanTurner]

I have been noticing a number of crawls by teomagent recently, but it is only picking up some of our sites.

I have also picked up the alexa toolbar in the same timescale - any potential linkl??

[Marn]

I just noticed something in my Webtrends and logs ( my site is purposely UNindexed)

teomaagent1 [[e-mail]]
teomaagent [e-mail]

these visiting spiders came and went in early August.

I have a deep web site that I do not want indexed in any search engine. It's for internal use, but some employees like to access it from home. I do not place any external hyperlinks, only to those on the company corporate website.

I tell the users to paste the incomplete URLs in their browser.

Teoma beat any other spiders to my site.

..I am wondering how it was indexed by this new search eingine Teoma?...My homepage is dead end, links to absolutely nothing and my custom 404 error page links to the corporate site, to external technical information.