Teoma

Teoma, pronounced tay o mah (from Scottish Gaelic teòma "expert"), was an Internet search engine founded in 2000 by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis and his colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Professor Tao Yang from the University of California, Santa Barbara co-led technology R&D. Their research grew out of the 1998 DiscoWeb project. The original research was published in the paper, "DiscoWeb: Applying Link Analysis to Web Search".

Teoma used a unique link-popularity algorithm. Unlike Google's PageRank, Teoma's technology (Subject-Specific Popularity) analyzed links in context to rank a web page's importance within its specific subject. For instance, a web page about "baseball" would rank higher if other web pages about "baseball" linked to it.

Many parts of Teoma's relevancy algorithm stemmed from the methodology which IBM developed for its CLEVER project.

Ask Jeeves acquired Teoma on September 11, 2001; it has powered ask.com and other international Ask Jeeves sites (such as ask.co.uk, ask.jp) and Ask Jeeves Spain since then. On 26 February 2006 Teoma was rebranded and redirected to Ask.com.

As of 2010 Ask.com referred to the Teoma algorithm as the ExpertRank algorithm.

The official word on Teoma from Ask.com as of May 2010: "We re-launched Teoma.com in mid-April 2010 to provide a simplified interface for everyday keyword web search. Teoma.com's organic results will be similar to, but not exactly the same as, those on Ask.com, primarily for testing purposes, but also to provide a more simplified search experience."