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Ask Jeeves Answers With Updated Search Engine

Teoma 2.0 offers more-specific searches and the ability to rate the expertise of pages returned as search results.

Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service

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Ask Jeeves has rolled out an updated version of its Teoma search engine, hoping to out-query competitors by offering refined search capabilities, a Web-based spelling checker, and improved context and relevance, among other new features.

The release of Teoma 2.0 Tuesday comes one year after Ask Jeeves integrated the search engine into its Ask.com site. Since then, the company has focused on differentiating its search offering from other players in the highly competitive Internet query market.

Teoma is taking a different tack from rivals such as Google by representing what it calls Subject-Specific Popularity in its search results, rating the expertise or knowledge a page contains according to how many same-subject Web pages refer to it. In this way, the company says, Teoma can display communities on the Web, and can represent a group of pages on or about the same subject.

The search engine also offers advanced search tools, allowing users to refine their queries using specific criteria such as exact phrase, page location, date, domain and site, and geographical region, as well as the ability to search within results. Additionally, users can now search in ten Western languages, including French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Teoma 2.0 also offers a spelling check that identifies query misspellings, as well as more-complete descriptions of search results that offer contextual information to help improve relevancy, the company said.

Tough Competition

With its community approach and improved feature set, Teoma is hoping to scoop up more of the search market, which has taken off in recent years with its ability to generate revenue through paid listings, advertising, and premium search services.

The company claims to now have 25 percent of the search market, behind leaders Google and Inktomi. Teoma said that since its inclusion in Ask.com it has improved relevancy and expanded its index by more than 500 percent, having crawled 1 billion Web pages and indexed more than 500 million URLs.

The company said that it plans to continue investing in the search service, improving its technology and relevancy to gobble up more of the market.

The Teoma technology was created by a group of scientists at Rutgers University who launched the Teoma.com site in April 2001. Emeryville, California-based Ask Jeeves purchased the site and technology in September of that year. Aside from powering the Ask.com search function, Teoma is also available at Teoma.com.

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