While Google is probably the top search engine of all you savvy web searchers, there is a new player in town you might want to check out. Teoma, which means "expert" in Gaelic, was created in 2000 by a team of scientists at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Ask Jeeves, Inc. acquired Teoma in September 2001.
PC Magazine has named Teoma as one of its top 100 undiscovered sites:
Teoma takes a step forward in search technology with subject-specific link analysis, ranking sites based on the number of same-subject pages that refer to them, taking into account the number and status of the referring sites.
(Source http://www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s=25087&a=21923,00.asp)
Teoma uses Subject-Specific PopularitySM to determine the authority or quality of a website's content. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site's level of authority. Teoma dynamically clusters the web's pages into topic-specific web communities. Since Teoma knows the topic groups on the web related to your search, it can display keywords from each group. Teoma looks for phrases it deduced as having mini-communities online because of how closely their pages are cross-linked. So far, no other search technology can dynamically cluster search results into these topic-specific web communities.
A Teoma search of Thomas Jefferson will retrieve three types of responses.
- Results - a list of authoritative web pages relevant to the topic
- Refine - a list of suggested topics to help narrow the search (e.g., Thomas Jefferson University)
- Resources - a list of sites, created by individual enthusiasts or experts on the subject, that feature summaries and collections of links to other sites
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