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player ready...Producers of the Web’s newest search engine, Teoma.com, are quick to shirk the mantle of “Google-killer.”
“It’s not really us saying we’re the biggest challenge yet to Google; it’s other people,” said Paul Gardi, Teoma’s vice president.
At the same time, Gardi will tell you that his product, www.teoma.com, relaunched in April after making a largely ignored beta appearance Sept. 11, is “the most advanced search technology out there today.” Given time, he predicts, its advantages will become apparent to millions of Net users.
Teoma (pronounced tee-O-ma) exploits one facet of the Internet that other search technologies ignore, its architects contend: deep, specialized Web sites created by experts.
These highly developed repositories are often hidden or ignored in results returned by other search engines, the Teoma argument goes. That’s because Google, for example, primarily ranks results by considering how many times other Web sites link to them.
Teoma founders believe a better search starts with a more limited set.
Teoma first searches out clusters of highly regarded expert pages containing the search terms. It then uses the number of links within that expert community to rank returns, a la Google.
Each Teoma search produces three lists. One features Teoma’s top-ranked pages. Another shows links to expert communities by specific topic. The third is a collection of links from the highest-ranked experts.
“Instead of getting broader and broader, it focuses in on communities gathered around the subjects that you’re really interested in exploring,” Gardi said.
Many Google addicts have found its interface and performance less than compelling.
Although its spare, logo-dominated page is similar to Google’s, Teoma lacks equivalent features. There is no image search. No older, cached pages are served up. It doesn’t scan newsgroups as Google Groups does. And it doesn’t suggest spellings as Google does.
Besides that, said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, its database leaves it short of a Google-level performance. Google has cached more than 1.5 billion Web pages. Teoma, acquired by Ask Jeeves Inc. last September, has archived about 200,000.