Teoma – The Superior Search Engine? - Teoma's Search Technology
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Teoma adds a new layer of “authority” to search results through something they call “Subject-Specific Popularity.” Google’s PageRank, simply explained, ranks pages based on the quality and the number of inbound links to a site. Teoma ranks sites based on related communities of sites that are “organically organized” and link to each other. It then determines which sites are most relevant based an authority factored, that is where Subject-Specific Popularity comes into play. Subject-Specific Popularity determines the authority of a site based on the number of pages that link to a page within the same subject. Teoma provides a nice analogy to why this is important. They write, “picture yourself in your garage, in front of the opened hood of your severely out-of-commission pick-up truck. You need help with this major repair, and you can either ask your uncle, who owns two cars but has never held a wrench in his life and happens to be visiting (similar to using other leading search technologies) or you could phone your best friend, who has a degree in applied mechanics and builds automobiles from the ground up in his spare time (similar to Subject-Specific Popularity). The choice is quite clear.”
When Teoma 2.0 was released it provided improved relevancy, more accurate communities, spell checking, “Dynamic Descriptions”, more advanced search tools and an expanded index. Ask Jeeves reports an increased “user pick-rate” of 22% and a site abandonment decrease of 28% since the upgrade. In addition, Teoma received a relevancy grade of “A” from Search Engine Watch, adding them to the elite group of search engines, which includes the likes of such others as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. By improving Teoma’s analysis of “Communities” they were able to increase the relevancy of pages by better evaluating authoritative pages. In addition, the “refine” search option found on Teoma.com enables searchers to easily narrow down their search results. Many search engines have Web-based spell check, and Teoma added this in its 2.0 version. Teoma 2.0 added other enhancements and features, as well as increasing its index by over 500 million URLs.
Next: Teoma’s Features and Advanced Search Functions >>
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