Interview with AskJeeves--New "Teoma" Search Engine.

[NamePopper.com]

A Look at Ask Jeeves and Teoma--by Robin Nobles

Source:www.sitepronews.com | Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists- www.academywebspecialists.com

Recently, Jim Lanzone, Vice President of Product Management with Ask Jeeves, attended a chat session with students from the Academy, and he answered a lot of very interesting questions about Ask Jeeves' Web properties.

So, let's look at this interview with Jim, and learn more about
Ask Jeeves and their relatively new search engine on the block,
Teoma.

As Vice President of Product Management, Jim overseas the
strategy, features, Web design, and product development for all
of Ask Jeeves' properties, including Ask.com, Teoma, and Ask
Jeeves for Kids at AJKids.com. Ask Jeeves is a top twenty Web
property and is among the most recognized Internet brands
worldwide.

Jim began by giving some background information about Ask Jeeves and Teoma.

"Ask Jeeves is one of the leading search engines on the Web, with more than 16 million unique users per month. We also recently launched a new search engine called Teoma (Gaelic for "expert," in case you were wondering).

"Both Ask.com and Teoma.com are powered by Teoma's search
technology. The difference between the two sites lies in the
design and the features.

"Here's an easy way to think about it: Ask is for `Passengers'
(people who want help searching) and Teoma.com is for `Drivers'
(people who don't).

"Our company makes money by serving advertisements that are
triggered by the searches people conduct on our sites. There are
three main types of advertisements: Graphical (e.g., banner ads),
Paid Placement (Sponsored Links), and a new program called "Paid Inclusion" (pay to be entered into our search index)."

Is free submission still an option?

Question: Can you still submit to Ask Jeeves if you have a site
that answers questions, like we have been able to do in the past
for free, or do you have to go through pay inclusion to get into
either index?

Jim: "Well, yes, if you want to submit, you need to pay. It takes
special attention, and therefore resources, for us to take a site
rather than simply crawl the Web as usual. But there are special
benefits to paying!

"Our editorial staff is much smaller than the old days, and the
`questions' for Jeeves (what we call the `Knowledge Base'
internally) are not emphasized as much as they used to be, so the
exposure will be more limited...and it may take our editors quite
a while to get to your site."

So, you can still submit your site to Ask Jeeves for free, but it
will probably take a while for your site to make it into the
index.

Jim: "For the search index, there is no free submit (for Teoma)."

Question: Compared to, for example, the free add URL in Google,
the one for Ask Jeeves makes you jump through hoops.

Jim: "That's because it's quite an old program that was developed
for our editors to review."

Remember that Ask Jeeves was established to answer questions, so you have to "prove" that your site does, in fact, very effectively answer the question you're going after - which is a lot more detailed than a simple submission at Google.

What about pay inclusion?

If you submit to Ask Jeeves' and Teoma's pay inclusion program,
your site will get visibility at both sites. The pay inclusion
program is now out of beta, so the subscription period is 12
months.

Benefits of their pay inclusion program include:

* Your page will be indexed within 7 days.
* Your page will be refreshed every 7 days.
* Your page remains in the index for 12 months.

Cost?

$30 for the first URL, and $18 each for 2 through 1000 URL's. For
larger numbers of pages, you can use their batch processing
facility.

Visit http://ask.ineedhits.com/ for more information.

Question: The Direct Hit site has been taken down, and traffic is
being redirected to Teoma. What about the Direct Hit results that
were being shown in engines like HotBot? Are those now Teoma
results?

Jim: "Yes, we still have Direct Hit on HotBot, as well as
BellSouth and InfoSpace. DirectHit.com is redirected to Teoma.
But some partners still have the old DH "pop" (popularity)
results. MSN still has the Direct Hit results.

"We will be merging pop into the Teoma technology sometime in the near future, but some partners still want it as a "one-off," and we are open to providing it."

Question: Teoma does crawl sites on its own? Is that correct?

Jim: "Yes, that's correct. Its index is currently featured on
both Ask.com and Teoma.com."

Question: A Web site with good link popularity then would not
need the Ask Jeeves/Teoma paid inclusion program?

Jim: "For a major site, that is probably true. However, for
smaller sites, or sites that refresh their content frequently (or
have many dynamic pages that are difficult for search engines to
crawl), paid inclusion is still a great option if you really want
the traffic. Paid inclusion sites are spidered weekly. Other
sites are spidered monthly, currently."

Question: When paying for inclusion for Ask Jeeves and Teoma, are the results shared with other partners? If so who?

Jim: "Currently, no. However, we're aggressively pursuing
partnerships that will extend our reach considerably. Not able to
say who just yet, but the usual suspects."

Question: In your FAQ's for Ask Jeeves/Teoma's pay inclusion
program (http://ask.ineedhits.com/faq.asp), it states that you
can't change URL's. Why?

Jim: "Because it's considered a new submission. We're not able to
put enough resources against it yet."

Question: So in the future, we'll have the ability to swap out URLs?

Jim: "We'll see, but I hear you. We are aware of Inktomi's
program."

Question: What's the difference in traffic between the premium
listings and the "regular" search results?

Jim: "Do you mean between Premier Listings (Featured Sponsor) and Paid Inclusion? There are two differences: 1) You are guaranteed that your listing will show up; 2) You are guaranteed that it will show up in a specific location on our page."

Question: Are Premier Listings twice as likely to be clicked on,
for example?

Jim: "Premier Listing is really just an ad. With Paid Inclusion,
you aren't paying for anything other than being included in the
index and then being subjected to the same relevance algorithms
that give us our other results, but with the other benefits that
I mentioned earlier.

"In terms of click ratio, I suppose it depends on how relevant
your site is to a given query. The match rate of a site that buys
ad space on our site is much more significant than one that
purchases via paid inclusion for now."

For more information about Premier Listings, visit:
http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/advertise/premier.html.

continued below...

 

[NamePopper.com]

continued...

Question: Let's say that I have a Web site:
http://myownwebsite.com, and let's say that my goal is for it to
become an "authoritative" site in Teoma. Could you give us some
tips on what we can do to try to be considered by Teoma as an
authoritative or expert site on a particular subject?

Jim: "Our recommendations are as follows: 1) you allow people to
link to you; 2) you offer quality content so that you become
popular among other sites of the same subject (i.e., experts).
Basically, that's it. None of our expert sites or authorities are
manually decided. It's based on our algorithms."

Question: On Teoma, are Teoma and Ask Jeeves results combined?

Jim: "Well, there really is no such thing as an Ask Jeeves
result. There are pre-fab, editorially selected `answers' to
certain queries that may appear at the top of the page if we have
a high level of confidence that we have the right answer. But as
far as the actual search results go, it's all Teoma...and we'll
layer in the Direct Hit click-pop at some point soon."

Question: But Teoma results ARE being shown at Ask Jeeves?

Jim: "That's exactly right. The part of the AJ page that says,
`You may find these search results helpful' has the Teoma
results. They were launched in January (and by no coincidence, we immediately saw a 30% increase in picks to those results.)"

Question: The "Featured Sponsor" section of Ask Jeeves, is that
the Premier Listings?

Jim: "Yes it is."

(End of interview/chat session)

Let's take a longer look at Teoma

If you haven't visited Teoma yet and performed a few searches,
you need to do so (http://www.teoma.com/). It's a really cool
engine with some very interesting and helpful features.

For example, it's a no-nonsense engine like Google with one
purpose only: search.

When you search at Teoma, you're given three sets of results:

* Results, which are relevant Web pages from the Teoma index;

* Refine, which are suggestions for narrowing your search;

* Resources, which are link collections from experts and
enthusiasts.

So with Teoma, if your search results are too broad, you can
immediately narrow them down by choosing one of the suggestions in the Refine section.

And, in the Resources area, you'll find "experts" in that
particular focus area. This is an excellent place to find related
and important sites that might be good candidates to contact
about swapping links.

More on Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves is the "question answering" search engine, which puts
it into a class of its own. (http://www.askjeeves.com)

At the top of the search results, you'll see a "featured sponsor"
section, which is their Premier Listing advertisement that we've
discussed previously.

With some searches, you'll see a "sponsored links" section, which
are results currently being provided by Overture. However, on
September 3, Ask Jeeves will be switching to Google for their
paid listings.

Then, you'll find search results from Teoma, followed by a
section called, "Other people with your search have also asked:"
In that section, you'll see additional questions that may help
answer your initial question, with results coming from Ask.com.

Like at Teoma, you can narrow your search down by choosing one of the search terms on the right-hand side of the page.

Ask Jeeves recently entered into an agreement with Google to
display their Google AdWords in Ask Jeeves results effective
September 3, 2002. Those results will be shown at both Ask Jeeves and Teoma as "sponsored links." For more information, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Ask-Jeeves-Google.html

In Conclusion

Teoma has taken over the old Direct Hit site, and I believe we'll
see some big things out of this fascinating engine in the future.

Ask Jeeves is as it's always been: unique - a place where you can
go and ask a question and be presented with several possible
answers.

If you haven't submitted your site to Ask Jeeves/Teoma, and if
your site isn't found in the Teoma index, I strongly suggest that
you consider their pay inclusion program and become a part of
their index.

 

[AMERICAR]

Thats a very good article .. NamePopper.

I think that it goes to show that if you don't pay .. you don't get.

Search engines are changeing the way they list and index a site
these days it is not easy to get a decent ranking without a lot of modifications and attention to your key words and meta tags.

I have just been though such an excercise, even to the extent of analyzing the site to opitimse it, gaining top points on the analyzer only to have the site rejected by damoz.org and google.

I have now stripped the site to the bare bones and had to start it over again, even with all of that there is only one way to get listed quickly .. and that is pay for inclusion .. not that you can do that with google or dmoz.

Nice thread ...

.

 

[Omni]

if you have to pay to be included and your site has been online for more than a short while, you have a problem

 

[AMERICAR]

Hey .. Omni

I have changed that site .. thx.net for your input.

Wot you doin up at this time of night .. h?h



.

 

[NamePopper.com]

Hi Americar & Omni.

It's a lot to read--but I learned several things from it. Interesting to hear it straight from the operators of one of the major new search engines. I am still confused about a lot of things. Like you said Americar--they keep changing and re-inventing themselves. Just when you thought you did it the most effective way--BOOM. Very frustrating.

 

[Omni]

Americar paid it a visit, some make-up can still be done

NamePopper it makes sense for them to keep re-inventing themselves - they've got Google to beat

 

[NamePopper.com]

Originally posted by Omni
NamePopper it makes sense for them to keep re-inventing themselves - they've got Google to beat

True Omni--good point.

Have either of you visited www.gigablast.com? I just found it yesterday. A small independent search engine--apparently run by one guy on his own machines--but I was fairly impressed with the speed and returns it gave me.
I need to go back and see exactly how they work. Go check it out if you haven't already.

 

[Omni]

Yup it's still a work in progress I believe, last check that guy was refreshing the database. The SE is suppose to index sites instantly - makes webmasters happy but it's not exactly the right target but we'll see