Teoma 3.0 Takes on Board Social Networking Theory

Ask Press Release 21/09/04

Based on social networking theory, the Teoma technology takes a unique approach to relevancy ranking. Like some search engines, Teoma utilizes a form of link popularity to assist in determining relevance, but Teoma doesn't stop there:

It goes a step further to analyze each page's reputation among experts on a given topic to determine relevancy. With this proprietary, patent-pending Subject-Specific Popularity(TM) technology, Teoma is the first and only search engine to break the Web down into topic-based "communities" of sites, and to give added credibility to those sites respected as authorities on a particular subject. Fittingly, Teoma means "expert" in Gaelic.

The first publicly disclosed upgrade to Teoma in over a year, Teoma 3.0 provides many improvements, including:

• Increased Relevance -- Ask Jeeves has introduced improvements to the core Teoma algorithms, including enhanced ability to classify content in order to better assess authority.
• Improved Freshness -- Teoma 3.0 provides major upgrades to the engine's ability to return recent news and information, including daily crawls of popular, news, and other important sites. Teoma 3.0 features a newly designed architecture that will accelerate continued improvements in freshness in the months ahead.
• Expanded Index -- The Teoma index has surpassed 2 billion English-only Web documents, and is expected to exceed 2.5 billion by year's end. The new database size is determined after the removal of spam, duplicates and pornographic results.
• International -- Teoma 3.0 technology supports double-byte Asian languages, enabling the recent beta launch of Ask Jeeves Japan (Ask.jp), the first non-English based Teoma index.
• Features -- Teoma 3.0 will include the addition of several new features, including:
  
  - Page Cache -- Teoma 3.0 includes cached versions of popular sites. This feature is expected to launch in Q4.
  
  - Related Search -- Ask Jeeves will introduce multiple types of Related Search on Ask Jeeves, through the Teoma 3.0 technology. This feature will launch in Q4.
  
  - File Types -- Teoma 3.0 includes the addition of Flash and PDF files. These file types are already available on Ask Jeeves, and Ask Jeeves will, in future releases, provide the ability to restrict searches to these types of files.

"Teoma is the only search engine that can determine the authority of individual Web pages across the billions of documents on the Web. This unique capability is critical in delivering the best search results for users," said Lanzone. "With our new release, Teoma is emerging from its adolescence and further cementing its place as a world-class search engine, one of only three available to consumers today."

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