Teoma Category Archive
Teoma 3.0
Ask Jeeves announced the official launch of Teoma 3.0 search technology at both the Ask Jeeves and Teoma sites. The upgrade includes
- "Increased Relevance by enhancing its "ability to classify content in order to better assess authority."
- Improved Freshness "including daily crawls of popular, news, and other important sites.
- An expanded database with over "2 billion English-only Web documents" and a plan to get over 2.5 billion by the end of the year.
- Support for double-byte Asian languages, "enabling the recent beta launch of Ask Jeeves Japan (Ask.jp), the first non-English based Teoma index."
- New search features announced but not yet available includecached pages, related searches on Ask Jeeves, the ability to restrict by file types (PDF and Flash).
Teoma and Ask Jeeves Add PDFs
Teoma (and thus Ask Jeeves as well) has added indexed PDF files to their database. Unfortunately, they do not yet have any limit syntax, although adding a inurl:pdf to a query term comes close. On Ask Jeeves, the PDF files have a red (PDF File) after the title while on Teoma [PDF File] is in green after the title.
Advanced Search Page at Ask
Further integrating Teoma search features, Ask Jeeves now has an advanced search page. It has all the same features as the Teoma advanced search page except for the ability to get more than 10 results at a time and to open results in a new browser window. However, both of these options are available not at Ask Jeeves via the "Your Settings" preferences page. In addition, an adult content filter is available there which is not available from Teoma. No link to the advanced search page is available from the main Ask Jeeves page at this point, but there is a link on every results page.
HotBot's Teoma Adds Advanced Search
HotBot's version of Teoma has finally added some of the advanced search features that have been available on Teoma's site for the past few months. It does not include all of the advanced search features but does offer language, date, and region limits along with the offensive content filter that had been there before. In addition, Teoma's 'metasites' or 'resources' now also show up at HotBot right under the Teoma logo. Only one metasite is listed after 'Try Resources' but a link to 'More' will display up to ten. Also, if you set HotBot's results preferences to display related searches, they will now show up for Teoma as well.
Teoma 2.0 Press Release
Today Teoma officially announced the changes they implemented last week. The press release highlights their new advanced search features, KWIC display, improved relevance, better communities, and a larger database.
Teoma Adds Advanced Search & Preferences
A full announcement is supposed to be coming out on Jan. 21, but already the Teoma site is now offering an advanced search page and a customization page. The advanced search makes using the new advanced features introduced in November much easier to use. It includes word filters, phrase options, field searches in title or URL (but these can not be combined), expanded language limits, a geographic region limit, and a date limit. There are now 10 language limits, with English and Swedish being the new additions. You can get up to 100 results at a time on the advanced search or by using the customization option. And they have added spelling suggestions for English terms. In addition, they are now claiming increased relevance satisfaction and a database of 500 million URLs from a crawl of 1 billion. Teoma Review updated.
HotBot Searches Four
HotBot has relaunched and now can search Inktomi, Google, FAST, and Teoma. Terra-Lycos, the owner of HotBot, says that with the new HotBot, they want to give the users control. It certainly makes it easy to check four of the major Web search engines from one interface. The front page no longer has ads and flashing banners and pop-ups should be gone from other pages. And the advanced features are readily available and properly translated for each of the four search engines, if they are supported. If they are not supported, HotBot will say that "These filters are not yet supported."
However, several advanced features are gone from the previous version of HotBot:
- Boolean option for Inktomi searches
- Name search (listed as "the person" previously)
- Truncation and word stemming
- The ability to choose more than 10 results on the advanced search page is gone (and with the Preferences, it will now only give up to 50 hits but Google and Teoma will not even give that many)
- And the "More results from this site" link does not always show up, meaning that when it does not the searcher can only find one page per site
Teoma OR and Phrases
Teoma now can use an OR and is supposed to do phrase searching correctly. Previously the phrase searching was only approximate. The OR must be in all upper case letters, but without nesting the processing of a simple x y OR z gets treated as (x AND y) OR z which is not what most people would expect. Also, the spell check is now in beta for common English words only (not names), and they are asking for feedback on it. I have updated my Teoma review (and my features chart and the list by feature page) to reflect the changes.
Advanced Features at Teoma
Teoma has updated their database, expanded it by 60% (to about 350 million records after crawling 750 million), and added several new search features. Eventually there should also be an advanced search page and spelling suggestions. What's new?
- Site collapsing: first two hits per domain are listed with others under a "More results from . . . " message (even if there are only two).
- KWIC (keyword-in-context) display
- Stop words are searched within phrases
- New field searches
- Language limits
Teoma Relaunch
Ask Jeeves' has launched Teoma out of beta today with a redesigned site. The folders are now called "Refine." The metasites formerly called Expert's Links are now called Resources. And at the very top are some paid links from Overture. See their press release for more details.
Teoma Paid Inclusion
Sometime in the past week or so, Ask Jeeves launched a paid inclusion program for Teoma. At $30 for the first URL and $18 for others, it is currently the only way of adding a URL to the Teoma database. There is no free add URL feature. Ask Jeeves will refresh paid submissions every seven days.
Teoma at Ask Jeeves
Jan. 9, 2002: Ask Jeeves announces the completion of the integration of Teoma search results into Ask Jeeves. These results were added sometime in December. Today's press release claims a 25% increase in user satisfaction rate after the introduction. The Teoma results are listed under the heading "You may find my search results helpful." The press release also notes that the Teoma site will continue as well and is due out of beta in the second quarter of this year.
Teoma Bought by Ask Jeeves
Teoma has been bought by Ask Jeeves. According to the Ask Jeeves Press Release, Ask Jeeves will use Teoma's technology across its Web properties (which include both Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves), and Teoma.com will continue as a pure search engine.
Subscribe