Teoma – The Superior Search Engine?
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One search engine that really caught my attention at the search engine strategies conference in Chicago was Teoma. Teoma is the search engine that powers Ask Jeeves, also known as Ask.com. Teoma has made several improvements to its engine over the past year, and has drastically increased its indexing and the quality of results generated. Teoma has a unique method of ranking sites, reffered to as “authority.”  In addition, Teoma offers a toolbar and many of the advanced search features that other search engine have.

Teoma’s History and Background

Teoma’s founder and vice president of research and development, Apostolos Gerasoulis, Ph.D, is a Professor of computer science from Rutgers University. Professor Gerasoulis, along with his team of computer scientists founded Teoma in April of 2000. Their single goal was to build a search engine that looked “at the Web in terms of subject-specific communities.” Teoma had the advantage of joining the search engine wars late in the game. This allowed the Teoma team to look at what the current engines did right and - more importantly - what they. Teoma.com was not officially launched until a year later, in April 2001.

On September 18, 2001, Ask Jeeves, Inc. acquired Teoma, paying over USD $1.5 million. On January 9, 2002, Ask Jeeves announced its successful integration of the Teoma search technology into Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves reported an increase user satisfaction of 25% and a site abandonment rate of 15% less after this integration. In 2002 Nielsen/NetRatings reported that Teoma had grown 175%, making Teoma the third most popular search engine in the United States.

Teoma 2.0 was released on January 21, 2003. The new version boasts improvements to overall search result relevancy, additions to search tools, and more advanced search functions.  Teoma currently powers Ask Jeeves’s primary organic results, and receives its paid search results from Google AdWords.

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