Teoma Getting into the Toolbar Game

[rubble88]

From the Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk
http://resourceshelf.freepint.com

Web Search--Teoma
Coming Tuesday: Teoma Set to Introduce Toolbar App
Teoma is getting into the toolbar game. It will feature an option that allows users to e-mail any web page and message to a friend or colleague along with several other options. More details on 6/25.

[Brett_Tabke]

I went searching for info about this on teoma
[teoma.com...]

Is there any info about this on their site?

[jatar_k]

I can't seem to find anything I was looking at teoma and ask.

[jatar_k]

spoke too soon

[sp.ask.com...]

[caine]

Do you reckon many will download it ?

[jatar_k]

I wonder that as well. I read the faq to see if you could install it with the google toolbar but strangely it doesn't mention it. I downloaded it and will have to play with it a bit and see what it is like.

no MAC solution in the works it seems either.

[Brad]

It says in the FAQ that it should work with other toolbars.

Maybe they can make deals with computer manufacturers and just have IE come with the bar already installed.

(I'd really like an Opera version.)

[Axacta]

"The Teoma Search Bar is dynamically upgradeable. Rather than having to download a new version of the Teoma Search Bar whenever additional features are made available, these new features will automatically be added as options to your Search Bar."

Well at least Teoma is up front about their automatic updates. There is another thread discussing Google's auto update, where they seem to have done it on the sly. [webmasterworld.com...]

[mfagan]

Well you'll be able to tell when people use it to find your site, the url is appended with "qsrc=4", presumably meaning "query source." Just like Google's contains "&sourceid=navclient"

I've downloaded it and tried it out.

The highlighting is exactly the same as Google's. The dictionary used is Merriam-Webster. I sent a page to myself a few minutes ago and haven't gotten it yet.

Now that I've seen it, I don't think I'll be using it any more. It just doesn't have anything that I couldn't already do just as fast, and I never e-mail people about pages.

[jiffypop]

i just checked out the new teoma toolbar and the highlight feature is actually very cool. if you turn it on, it stays on where ever you go (on all sites, web documents, search results pages, etc). i've noticed that with google's highlight, i have to reset it everytime i go to a new page (despite the fact that the highlight feature appears to be active, i.e. the button appears to be depressed on my toolbar).

[EliteWeb]

jiffypop welcome to the board (:
I did not notice that about googles bar or teomas bar very good to know. Not the best thing in the world but even the simplest things make the difference.

I had to take off the toolbar though because I cant have the bars taking up so much space :)~ and im not tossing google for this one yet (:

[Brett_Tabke]

Finally got around to dl'ing and installing it. Works good. The email a friend link is good for even emailing yourself a copy of the page. Unfortunatly, it's very hard to set a "not microsoft" email program to use with ie.

I hope they have good luck with it.

ew: I turn googles off most of the time any way. I feel a bit more secure using teoma's. All that back channel chatter with googles, is unnerving. I don't know if Teoma's is any better, but after a few packet sniffs, it - well, fire one up and you make the call.

[Orion]

Many people think that the search tool bar has been one reason for Google's amazing success in obtaining a hefty percentage of the search market in a short period of time.

What would it take for you to load another search tool bar, and dump your Google tool bar?

The ability to add your own bookmarks?
The ability to customize the look and feel?
The ability to get live updates when certain web pages change?

Or for the SEO crowd, the ability to see how your Overture listings are doing (rank, cpc, changes, ROI, etc.)

:-)

[skibum]

If Teoma was ever to take steps toward being a Google killer or even serious competitor, this is a step they had to take. IMHO they need to push this, advertise it, and get the word out about how easy it is to install, how people can use it to search w/o having to go to a search site, etc..

Find some newbie who has no search bar installed, get them to install one, and chances are that will be their default search engine for future use.

Might it be time for Google to add functionality beyond search to increase the switching cost for users existing users? A mobile bookmark file or something like that?

[Josk]

Something like a cross platform, easy to update and use bookmark would get me to use the Google toolbar.

Just come out with one for Mozilla, though..

[prowsej]

In every version of Internet Explorer, you can already "File > Send > Page by E-Mail."

[ROLAND_F]

prowesj, you are right but I assume that this "email to a friend" function give data back to teoma.

It's worst than google, they can not only tell what you are interested in but also who should share the same interest as you and also they can
tell what is hot on the web just by counting how many times an url is forwarded by email. They can also build a map of who know who by using from/to email pairs...

Does somebody took a look at their privacy policy ?

I had the same idea 6 month ago but unfortunately such a feature require a powerfull backend that I don't have.

My analysis of such an "email this page to a friend" function is far more complete than their current implementation. If only somebody could share some web server that could support the load with me...

The Teoma toolbar use a webbug hosted at akamai

a692.g.akamai.net/7/692/253/d57ab3c74c051c/teoma.com/i/searchbartrafficdriver.gif

so we should also read the akamai privacy policy ...

The send to a friend system use an http POST request to
sp.ask.com/docs/teoma/toolbar/emailpage.php

and you can type any address you wish ...
So if you want that Santa Claus to email your friend ... use teoma toolbar.

It doesn't do any check, doesn't require registration prior use and if you have a "friend" who send you every page he his looking at on the web I guess that your mailbox can become full of unsolicited mail. Maybe there is a trigger to stop sending more than X emails to an email address ?

Currious people may want to have a look at C:\WINNT\system32 (or equivalent) and search for
a file teoma*.cfg ...

I haven't tried to do it yet but maybe by writing a worm that search for and patch this file you may catch the forwarded emails... I repeat ... it's not tried but with some much configurable options from a config file it *MAY* be possible.

Curious people may have a look at this url "www.theamk.com" found in the dll.

[Jaze]

What would make me use this more? Well for one, if they catered for different browsers and operating systems - it can't be that hard to develop!

Still waiting for Google to do this for IE Mac.... *sigh*

[ROLAND_F]

The .cfi file is in fact a BMP file containing all the icon of the toolbar.

[jesserud]

The Teoma toolbar is missing a lot of features that the Google toolbar has.
* Teoma's toolbar does not have a "Search Site" button.
* Google adds "Google Search" to Internet Explorer's context menu for selected text. Teoma does not. (This feature is built into Mozilla, by the way.)
* Shift+Enter doesn't open the search results in a new window like it does in the Google Toolbar.
* Alt+Enter doesn't go straight to the first hit like it does in the Google Toolbar (I'm Feeling Lucky).
* Alt+D (focus address bar) and Alt+G (focus Google toolbar) do not work while the Teoma toolbar has focus. Furthermore, CLICKING on the Google toolbar does not work when the Teoma toolbar has focus.

It does, however, have Alt+S to focus the search field in the toolbar (Google uses Alt+G). This is good because the first thing you're going to do after focusing the search field is type a search phrase using the keyboard.

The Teoma toolbar makes it easy to add and remove toolbar buttons. I like that.

The "Email this page to a friend" feature is useless. It creates a message that advertises the Teoma search bar and almost hides the information you were trying to send. Unlike the "Send Page" feature in IE and Mozilla, Teoma only sends a link to the page (like IE's and Mozilla's "Send Link"), but it doesn't tell you this.

Problems with BOTH toolbars:
* Neither Google nor Teoma makes their toolbar Search button search for selected text. (Same with the search buttons built into IE and Mozilla.) You can drag the selection into the search textbox, but that's awkward.
* Clicking search brings you to a page with a search box but does not focus the search box for you. In contrast, the front page for each search engine focuses the search box automatically, saving you a mouse click.
* Pasted Japanese text comes out as a bunch of question marks, and clicking search actually searches for question marks (%3f).
* The only version available is for Internet Explorer for Windows.

[ROLAND_F]

More Teoma toolbar fun :)

Add this section to your TeomaBar.ini located in you C:\WinNt\ folder

[Debug]
DebugEnable=1
LogFile=c:\teoma.log

And open "teoma.log" in you text editor.

[ROLAND_F]

Even more fun, use Teoma Toolbar to search using an other search engine :)

In teomab*.cfg in winnt\system32
change the following text

// keyword extraction
StdQueryPrefix=http://www.teoma.com/search.asp?
StdQueryKeyStart=t=

to

// keyword extraction
StdQueryPrefix=http://www.google.com/search?
StdQueryKeyStart=q=

Not test but I think that should work.

Hmmm after all this I have to say that I'm not very impressed by this toolbar. It look like an early beta.

[Orion]

Some great posts!

Continuing from my previous post, would you want the perfect search tool bar to:

1) Focus just on search (web search, site search, page search)

2) Focus just on navigation (add custom bookmarks, history, other browser like stuff)

3) Be like a portal in a tool bar (add stock quotes, sports scores, integrate with IM, etc)

4) Allow for ultimate personalization (look and feel, colors, shapes, etc)

Anything else?