More Search News: Today Teoma and Jeeves

[gary price]

A busy week for search news. Today word from Ask.Com and their Teoma engine.
Hopefully, Teoma's increase in size and refresh,  both supposedly coming soon.
With the demise of two crawled dbases (NL and Excite) in the past few weeks, this
additional engine (if it happens), will benefit all of us.

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http://www.irconnect.com/askj/pages/news_releases.mhtml?d=22540

>From the announcement,

"Ask Jeeves Web Properties, a division of Ask Jeeves(R), Inc., announced today
that it has successfully completed the integration of Teoma search
technology into Ask Jeeves (Ask.com), the 17th largest Web property according to
Nielsen Net Ratings. Teoma, which was acquired by Ask Jeeves in September 2001, is
a next generation search technology that uses advanced algorithms and
Subject-Specific Popularity(SM)* to generate more relevant and authoritative
results on the Web. Teoma search technology, combined with Ask Jeeves' extensive
audience reach and user-friendly interface, will help to solidify Ask Jeeves'
leadership position as a top search property."



"Teoma search results on Ask.com are featured under the heading "You may find my
search results helpful."
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A few quick searches of Ask Jeeves returned all or some of the following content
on a results page:
1) P-p-c content,
2) Pre-Formatted Questions
3) A search on the term "Chicago" includes a "helpful link" from Expedia (direct
access to Expedia dbase)
4) Featured Sponsor Box
5) "Try these search terms to see more answers" section
6) "You may find my search results helpful" section (this is the Teoma content)
7) Results from other search engine box

Not Available: Teoma's  "Pages by Topic" and  "Expert Links" sections.  These
sections
will be available later in 2002 after and Ask.Com redesign.

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"... Ask Jeeves also operates the Web site www.Teoma.com, in beta until Q2 2002,
as a stand-alone search engine."

Teoma is currently increasing the size and currency of the database.  According to
a spokesperson, the Teoma database is currently at about 150 million pages and
updated monthly. Top sites are set be refreshed a few times a week. The
spokesperson also told us that the beta will be lifted when the index is at about
the 250 million page mark. Finally, we learned that Teoma is working on
implementing spellcheck and cached paged features. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
At the moment a few quick searches of Teoma still shows the database to be several
months old.

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cheers,
gary

Looking for More News, New Sites, Search Tips?
Visit The Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk
http://resourceshelf.blogspot.com

Gary D. Price, MLIS
Librarian
Gary Price Library Research and Internet Consulting
gprice at gwu.edu