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Teoma arrive out of virtual obscurity last May. Within three months, they were purchased by AskJeeves.
Teoma has relaunched their new search engine today. Although visually it appears similar to the previous beta sites, there are some notable changes to the new search engine.
On the right side of most results page, you will find one or more Refine Result links. These links allow you to drill down into searches making them more accurate.
After a bit of warming up to the new feature, I've found myself using it often. It has an uncanny way of mimicking exactly the same search refinement process we tend to go through at other engines.
What is so fascinating about the feature, is Teoma's ability to identify major resources within communities. Most of us in the search engine marketing sector have heard of Kleinberg's famous Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, I believe Teoma takes the concept one step further. Not only does Teoma identify the major "authority" sites in any community via it's "resources" links on the results pages, but it is able to determine the relevance of any link.
Gardi says that what makes Teoma so much different from other static search engine indexes, is that Teoma, "creates on the fly, clusters of web pages into topic specific web communities".
You can see this in action by using the refine option to drill down into searches. While it may appear that you are using a type of "search within these results" method, it becomes clear that is not the case at all. There is something more fundamental at work than a simple include/exclude type of search.
Teoma was able to determine that Webmasterworld was part of the search engine optimization community and NOT part of the search engine community itself. Other engines often lump us in with the search engines, or other forums themselves.
One has to wonder about the processing overhead that is involved in such a real time feat. It could explain why Teoma has remained with somewhat of a small index (by comparison to a few other engines).
The refine option is somewhat radical, I had to wonder if users will use it, or ignore it. Gardi said, "it will be a process of education, but we are going to stick with it".
The refinement process with other search engines is a game of "catch me if you can". You set and think up the magic search words to get the results you want. That process is always fraught with missteps. In the end, a search results page is only as good as the search terms that went into it. The Teoma refinement suggestions reduce all that guess work to simple clicks.
The accuracy of simple searches is ok, but once you start to work down through the refinement process, suddenly results become hyper relevant. If they can get this feature to catch on with users - they may just have something big here. This is a whole new way to use a search engine.
While we all ran over the cliff with the easy to visualize Bow Tie Theory, Teoma presented a more complex view of the web as communities. Each community is only connected at the edges to other communities, inside of their authoritative sphere of influence. By using the refine search option you can certainly see this aspect at work as sub-searches tend to stay in their community of influence and do not go down false links like other theme oriented engines.
Another option for marketers is that of the AskJeeves paid inclusion program. The paid inclusion program is handled by Ineedhits and is similar to other search engine inclusion programs, but is cheaper. A url subscription is good for 15 months - three months longer than other search engines.
Gardi said they would not allow paid inclusion to influence results in any way. In fact, Gardi felt that paid inclusion made their job easier by helping to identify quality sites to a degree. Gardi felt that if they have the promotion budget for inclusion, "it's usually a sign that they have a quality web team to back it up".
Paid inclusion turn around time was expected to be around seven days. That should be enough for most sites, and keep the quality of the index high by thwarting algo analysis. Gardi said they were also exploring XML direct feeds and may make them available in the near future.
| Stock Symbol | ASKJ |
| Exchange | Nasdaq NM |
| Last Trade | 2.11 (04/01:AM EST - 4-1-2002) |
| Sector | Technology |
| Industry | Software & Computer Services |
| Employees | Approximately 420 |
| The Name | Teoma means expert in Gaelic |
| Teoma Management | Paul Gardi, Vice President of Search, Background in venture capital, product management and operations. |
| Teoma Founders | Apostolos Gerasoulis, Ph.D., Vice President of Research & Development, Teoma Founder. Professor (CS) at Rutgers University. Expert in applied mathematics and numerical computing, parallel software and applications. Tao Yang, Ph.D., Chief Scientist Associate Professor (CS) at UC Santa Barbara. Expert in parallel/distributed systems and scientific computing. |
| Teoma History | Teoma was founded in 2000 in Piscataway, New Jersey by a team of scientists from Rutgers University. Teoma means "expert" in Gaelic. Ask Jeeves, Inc. acquired Teoma in September 2001. |
| AskJeeves Management Team | A. George (Skip) Battle, Chief Executive Officer and Director Steve Sordello, Chief Financial Officer Claudio Pinkus, President, Jeeves Solutions Steven Berkowitz, President, Web Properties George Lichter, President of Ask Jeeves International |
| About AskJeeves | Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 in Berkeley, CA, by David Warthen, veteran software developer, and Garrett Gruener, venture capitalist at Alta Partners and founder of Virtual Microsystems. |
| AskJeeves Company Blurb | Jeeves Solutions is a leading provider of enterprise class question answering technology that delivers Connected Self-Service and essential customer intelligence. Through an intuitive interface that connects customers with the information, products and services they are looking for, Jeeves Solutions uses sophisticated Analytics to deliver critical, customer-driven information to corporations. This essential data enables companies worldwide to build profitable relationships with their customers, prospects and suppliers. By learning from every online customer interaction, Jeeves Solutions helps companies cost-effectively increase the quality and depth of customer interactions and leverage customer insight to guide product, sales and marketing strategies. Corporate customers including British Telecom, DaimlerChrysler, Dell, Nestle, Nike and the State of Washington use Jeeves Solutions. |
| AskJeeves Solutions | http://www.jeevessolutions.com/ |
| AskJeeves for Kids! | http://www.ajkids.com/ |
| Recent News Items | http://www.irconnect.com/askj/pages/news.mhtml |
| Site Submission | http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/addjeeves/Submit.html |
| Editorial Guidelines | http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/about/policy.html |
| Pregnuta.com | http://www.pregunta.com/ |
| Ask.co.uk | http://Ask.co.uk.com |
| Teoma Spiders | |
| IP Addresses | 63.236.92.* Main block: 63.236.92.144 - 63.236.92.153 random spiderings: 65.192.195.0 - 65.192.195.31 |
| Agents | teoma_agent1 teoma_agent1 [crawler_admin@teoma.com] teoma_agent1 [teoma_admin@hawkholdings.com] teoma_agent1_[crawler_admin_at_teoma.com] teomaagent crawler-admin@teoma.com |
| Teoma Headquarters 1551 South Washington Avenue Suite 400 Piscataway, NJ 08854 | Ask Jeeves, Inc. Headquarters 5858 Horton Street Suite 350 Emeryville, CA 94608 |
| Hawk Holdings Launches Teoma Technologies |
| DiscoWeb : Discovering Web Communities Via Link Analysis (DiscoWeb team) |
Division of Computer and Information SciencesTeoma is a powerful new tool for searching the Internet that grew out of the 1998 DiscoWeb project at Rutgers. Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis was principal investigator on DiscoWeb and formed a private company to develop the technology under a license from the university. |
| Web Structure Analysis (links compilation) |
| Structure of The Web (J. Kleinberg, S. Lawrence -PDF) |
| Structural Analysis of The World Wide Web D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan |
| Inferring Web Communities from Link Topologies D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, and P. Raghavan |
| Trawling the Web for emerging Cyber Communities Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Andrew Tomkins |
AskJeeves Media relations is handled by Dotted Line Communications
I am sure that all will read this, including myself.
The results from what I looked through in some competitive searhes remind me of Inktomi before yahoo switced to google. Lots of tasty spam from cookie cutter pages that either use old frames spam techniques, or use some quick refreshes from old spam pages. As a matter of fact, I see some of the pages/domains from two years ago right at the top of the pile. The relevant sites seem to be starting in the 20's for what I was looking at.
Still we need the teomas of tomorrow to challenge the googles of today. Go Teoma!
I've not noticed any of these problems. Are we seeing different search results or are some searches more reliable than others? The only problem I have found with Teoma is that my site is number 5 not number 1 (although I know how to change this).
great post Mr T, now I know what you were doing over the Easter break
Jason
P.S. Great objective review of Teoma!
It's great to finally have some good info on Teoma other than what has been passed out recently in the form of press releases and news articles.
I've been using that refine search a lot too. In addition to weeding out some listings that I do not need, it gives me a few terms/categories that didn't cross my mind but could be useful in narrowing that search.
Im just wondering if anyone would like to start a new thread in regards to the pro's & cons of teoma as opposed to this thread making us more aware of it :)
I just ask because one search produced 3 SERP's from the same site, I'm just wondering.....
I must agree with eljefe3 in that I found a LOT of spam in some of the top level sites returned in the SERPS including their "resources" link where I found a link farm.
Hopefully, over time they will be able to sort these out.
I know what you mean Msgraph. I wasn't friendly with the "refine" option at first and I forced myself to use it while studying it. Within about two dozen searches, I found myself off looking at websites that I was interested in, instead of studying Teoma. I had to laugh - they got me with it. I hope others will give it a chance, as I think they have something there with it.
When I was first using it, I was thinking it was like the classic Infoseek, search within these results option, but it's not. This is a new way to use a search engine. That's saying alot. It's so subtle, I wonder if users will pick it up?
when your title is with an accent, the results show a <?> instead of.
I can see using Teoma as a secondary search tool with Google now and then (the way I once used both AltaVista and Infoseek), but I think it will be a while before Teoma is a serious competitor to Google.
fingers crossed for another good traffic source
I suspect they'll have to increase the size of their database by at least an order of magnitude until the potential of their algorithm really kicks in. Right now, they simply don't know about enough of the links out there to make much sense of many topics. They may already be good for those topics that webmasters and SEO professionals are interested in, but for most non-web related topics there's quite some room for improvement. I've found examples where the "refine" links were rather contraproductive for the things I was looking for.
Not quite there yet, but worth to be watched in any case.
Also good to see that they changed their logo to look a little less similar to Google's...
Lawman
Often you can gather a good insight of a product or service by considering their approach to serving the market and capacity for innovation.
Very promising...
ok it's not going get anywhere near my google traffic yet, but it's a start
I have gotten my first hits from Teoma today and yesterday -- must be the publicity.
I hope they do well. We need more quality search engines.
Print publicity-wise, Teoma is striking pay-dirt now. Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]
