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Teoma

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Teoma, pronounced chawmuh (from Scottish Gaelic teòma "expert"), was an Internet search engine founded in 2000 by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis and his colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Professor Tao Yang from the University of California, Santa Barbara co-led technology R&D. Their research grew out of the 1998 DiscoWeb project. The original research was published in the paper, "DiscoWeb: Applying Link Analysis to Web Search".[1]

Teoma was unique because of its link popularity algorithm. Unlike Google's PageRank, Teoma's technology (Subject-Specific Popularity) analyzed links in context to rank a web page's importance within its specific subject. For instance, a web page about "baseball" would rank higher if other web pages about "baseball" link to it.

Many parts of Teoma's relevancy algorithm were based on the methodology IBM developed for its CLEVER project.

Teoma was acquired by Ask Jeeves on September 11, 2001, and has powered ask.com and other international Ask Jeeves sites (such as ask.co.uk, ask.jp) and Ask Jeeves Spain since then. On 26 February 2006, Teoma was rebranded and redirected to Ask.com.[2]

The Teoma algorithm is now referred to by Ask.com as the ExpertRank algorithm.[3]

The official word on Teoma from Ask.com in May 2010: "We re-launched Teoma.com in mid-April 2010 to provide a simplified interface for everyday keyword web search. Teoma.com's organic results will be similar to, but not exactly the same as, those on Ask.com, primarily for testing purposes, but also to provide a more simplified search experience.

Some[who?] predicted a rapid increase in popularity for Teoma and other search engines following Google's introduction of hard-to-remove, intrusive page backgrounds in June 2010.

See also

References

  1. ^ B. D. Davison, A. Gerasoulis, K. Kleisouris, Y. Lu, H. Seo, W. Wang, and B. Wu. (1999) DiscoWeb: Applying Link Analysis to Web Search. Presented at the Eighth International World Wide Web Conference, Toronto, May.
  2. ^ "Another Brand Retirement of Note: Teoma". Ask.com Blog. 2006-02-26. Retrieved 2006-02-27.
  3. ^ IAC > Our Businesses > Ask.com. IAC. Accessed May 14, 2010.

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