Slashdot Mirror

I had almost zero interest in the internet until there was AltaVista. Fire up lynx and go http://altavista.digital.com, and you could get lost for hours on end. Then they started going overboard on graphics. That sucked when you were using Netscape on 14.4Kbps . Spammers and search optimizers and the whole eyeball fetish of the dot.com boom rendered AltaVista increasingly unusable, and with other alternatives crowding the marketplace, AltaVista was becoming irrelevant. (The same marketing forces impinge upon Google today, if you ask me.) Finally, paid placements really killed AltaVista for me. That destroyed a lot of other search engines too. Until Google was on the scene I prefered directories like yahoo! or dmoz and dreaded having to resort to a search engine.

Another Account

Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) AltaVista was a latecomer to the scene; it had its online debut in December 1995. Nonetheless, it had a number of innovative features that quickly catapulted it to the top. The least of the features was its speed. Run on a bunch of DEC Alphas, it had the horsepower to handle millions of hits per day without slowing down in the slightest.

The rest of its features, all available from introduction, changed the face of search engines forever. AltaVista was the first to use natural language queries, meaning a user could type in a sentence like "What is the weather like in Tokyo?" and not get a million pages containing the word "What." Additionally, it was the first to implement advanced searching techniques, such as the use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.). Furthermore, a user could search newsgroup articles and retrieve them via the web as well as specifically search for text in image names, titles, Java applets, and ActiveX objects. Additionally, AltaVista claims to be the first search engine to allow users to add to and delete their own URLs from the index, placing them online within 24 hours.

One of the most interesting new features AltaVista provided was the ability to search for all of the sites that link to a particular URL. This was very useful for web designers who were trying to get some popularity for their pages; they could frequently check to see how many other pages were referencing them.

....

Here's the source for this quote. Here's a list of search engine history links where I found that essay.

The list I found by googling "AltaVista history," which gives good results on the first page, but has a lot of "noise" after that. Contrasted with altavista or alltheweb, google seemed to know what I want. Vivisimo also adequately foregrounded what I wanted, and makes it easy to refine the search. Altavista's Prisma has a good refined search, but it is called simply "engines" and in the context of sites that may have been about the Industrial Revolution or Medieval sieges, it didn't quite jump out at me. Teoma gives relevant results on the first page and an outstanding search refinement. Based on this, I'd say the new altavista is good, but I've got my eye on teoma.

> Quartz anti-aliasing for Carbon apps

About time. Anti-aliased fonts have only been in Windows and X for several years.

> Unicode character palette

Uh. 'Kay. Windows 2000 has one of those.

> Mount ftp servers directly in Finder

Gosh! And Explorer can't do this... in what way? Oh, that's right - it can do this.

> iChat

Try MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or Trillian.

Take your pick, really.

> Sherlock 3

Is nothing more than a glorified search engine front-end. Try Google or Teoma instead.

> Quartz Extreme

Putting "EXTREME" on the end of something makes it much more exciting, no? No.

> better interopability with windows networks

Samba. Yawn. Also: Windows has no interoperability issues with Windows networks.

> IPv6

And this is usable... how? Unless you have an internet2 connection, but you're probably enlightened and running a genuine *BSD at that point.

> Rendezvous
> Inkwell
> improved Address Book

Oh really, how very interesting. Not.

Anyway, in conclusion: I don't really like Microsoft or Apple, but neither is an "escape" from the other. They're both giant corporations that want to take your money - and they certainly aren't getting any of mine if I can help it.

Yes, I use Windows 2000 and FreeBSD. In my mind, Windows 2000 (pre service pack 3) was the last, greatest OS that Microsoft will ever produce. They've destroyed it all with all of Windows XP's Mickey-Mouse bullshit look of a toy operating system, the same crap that irritates me in OS/X - I'll migrate completely to FreeBSD as Windows 2000 fades into obsolesence.

I still love google as well, but Teoma is decent and fast. Like Google, they don't shove banner ads down your throat, and the prominantly display sponsored links. They also have some cool unique features to refine your search to relavant areas, rather than you having to manually choose the narrowing keywords yourself. Give em a gander.

Well, I was pretty sure that Teoma clearly labels the paid results at the top of their results pages, but when I went to confirm, there was no server there! I guess you're right-- they must be on vacation.

Teoma also makes their sponsored links quite prominant. I use Google mainly, but once in awhile I try Teoma too, and am quite impressed. Teoma's "Refine" feature is really REALLY cool, and works well.

Teoma slashdot+"first post"
Google slashdot+"first post"

If you want information in a particular domain, ask for it.

• "Teoma Sucks" returns "We found no matches for your search "teoma sucks""

  "Google sucks" returns 15 matches.

• "Google Sucks" on Google returns a boat-load.

  "Teoma Sucks" A few results--obviously, not a popular topic

  Teoma Sucks on Google returns a lot, too.

• "Teoma Sucks" returns "We found no matches for your search "teoma sucks""

  "Google sucks" returns 15 matches.

• "Google Sucks" on Google returns a boat-load.

  "Teoma Sucks" A few results--obviously, not a popular topic

  Teoma Sucks on Google returns a lot, too.

Teoma
Google

Google had the first link to a troll "first post" as the six search item. Teoma didn't even have one on the first page.

But what if the search engine business really is unprofitable? Would you pay to keep something like Google around? If so, how much, and how would you pay?

• AllTheWeb
• Google
• Teoma
• WiseNut
• AltaVista

I think i remember Teoma making the same claim, "we're better than Google.".
They should be featured on one of those shows - Where Are They Now?

This article is basically a fancy way of confirming the tyranny of the majority. Google's PageRank, as good as it is, both a) suffers from and b) perpetuates the tyranny of the majority (aka "the rich get richer", the "power law"). IE, the more links, the higher the pagerank, the more relevance, the more hits, the more links...

Teoma seems to be aiming at this chink in Google's armor.

From Teoma's page,...

Teoma uses Subject-Specific PopularitySM. 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.

Using vectoring algorithms to find themed hives of related content, Teoma partitions the power law into manageable chunks. IE, the rich get richer, but at least a dominant site in one field doesn't get artificially inflated relevance when querying an unrelated field. At least in theory. (Kinda like laws are supposed to keep a monopoly from illegally entering other markets, but I digress.)

This is working for Teoma: I (and others) are finding useful stuff on Teoma that Google didn't.

Google is already aware of this particular limitation of PageRank, as can be seen from what they suggest programmers submit to their programming contest...

Entries in the Applications track generally deal with the semantics of the data. Some examples include:

Detecting common templates in pages, and separating out the common structure from the individual content.
Classifying links on a page.
Detecting pages that are near-duplicates of one another.
Clustering pages by topic or type.

Even with all that, I still think that humans are the best filters (and isn't a search engine just a programmable filter?). I suspect the rise of weblogs might have something to do with the usefulness found in tapping into some weblogger's idea of what's useful/cool/interesting.

So perhaps the best way to find good info is a cross between a human and a content-vectoring search algorithm. Maybe that's why Ask Jeeves bought Teoma.

Any readers interested in connecting this concept to quantitative proof that being good pays, should attempt correlation with 'Game Theory' as well. That ought to ring a bell with certain computer geeks in our community.

Anyways, good luck. I know there is a thesis in here somewhere.

- Later, SmartAs ...

April fools is a national thing not just a /. thing

I'm starting to question the whole Teoma thing a little also...

Sounds like a browser issue. I was able to type it in fine, and Teoma did in fact come back with the ó printed correctly, however the results were garbage. My browser, Macintosh MSIE/5.0, submitted ó as %F3 which is its ISO-8859-1 codepoint (ISO-8859-1 is a superset of ASCII with 128 more characters, including most Western Euro accented vowels). How did yours submit it? If it represented the character as three %XX entities (dont know them off the top of my head), that means youre browser is using UTF-8, which is much less-supported.

First I did a search on both Google and Teoma for the shortened version of my first name. On the first page of results for Google, my homepage shows up as the first hit and a piece of mail I submitted to Brunching Shuttlecocks as the second. A smattering of the remaining hits relate to me. On Teoma, the first hit was the Brunching Shuttlecocks mail, the second a page that links to me, and the third an old web based chemistry project. My homepage doesn't show up anywhere in the first couple pages of hits. With my full name on Google, the first hit is me, the second a graphic/web designer with the same name. Tehoma hits me a couple times tangentially on the first page, but nothing substantial.

I've used the phrase 'Wombat underground' as the silly title of my homepage since high school, so I was curious where it would show up. With Google the first three hits were right on the money. All me. With Tehoma the first, second and fourth hits are good, but it still didn't hit on my personal homepage.

Searched for the string 'hungerf9.' Teoma found 5, google 110, all of which pointed to me.

First I did a search on both Google and Teoma for the shortened version of my first name. On the first page of results for Google, my homepage shows up as the first hit and a piece of mail I submitted to Brunching Shuttlecocks as the second. A smattering of the remaining hits relate to me. On Teoma, the first hit was the Brunching Shuttlecocks mail, the second a page that links to me, and the third an old web based chemistry project. My homepage doesn't show up anywhere in the first couple pages of hits. With my full name on Google, the first hit is me, the second a graphic/web designer with the same name. Tehoma hits me a couple times tangentially on the first page, but nothing substantial.

I've used the phrase 'Wombat underground' as the silly title of my homepage since high school, so I was curious where it would show up. With Google the first three hits were right on the money. All me. With Tehoma the first, second and fourth hits are good, but it still didn't hit on my personal homepage.

Searched for the string 'hungerf9.' Teoma found 5, google 110, all of which pointed to me.

It's funny that Teoma has trouble defining its own identity. So, are you guys a search engine or a gambling casino? At least the users get to pick what they like most.

I wish them best of luck. Google is good now. What is to keep it from selling out like Yahoo is doing now? Competition is good. Now, I wish Teoma had a news archive.

So I run Teoma searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2. None of them finds the site I'm looking for. On the other hand, Google searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2 leave me Feeling Lucky.

Nathan, this is unacceptable.

So I run Teoma searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2. None of them finds the site I'm looking for. On the other hand, Google searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2 leave me Feeling Lucky.

Nathan, this is unacceptable.

So I run Teoma searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2. None of them finds the site I'm looking for. On the other hand, Google searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2 leave me Feeling Lucky.

Nathan, this is unacceptable.

Also of potential interest are a couple of links at the bottom of each search results page [to] try your search on AskJeeves.com or DirectHit.com. [I]t seems somewhat odd that they'd include links to what most people [...] consider to be inferior search engines instead.

Complete the thought. Ask Jeeves, Inc. owns both Teoma (September 2001) and Direct Hit (January 2000). The selected URLs prominently display that owership relation.

How well we show up when doing a vanity search.

How well we show up when doing a vanity search.

How well we show up when doing a vanity search.

Did ask.com buy out teoma?

It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.

The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:

"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."

You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.

Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?

Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)

Did ask.com buy out teoma?

It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.

The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:

"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."

You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.

Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?

Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)

Did ask.com buy out teoma?

It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.

The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:

"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."

You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.

Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?

Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)

Did ask.com buy out teoma?

It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.

The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:

"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."

You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.

Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?

Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)

Did ask.com buy out teoma?

It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.

The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:

"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."

You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.

Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?

Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)

Google does not do this, but Teoma has done it for some time, with results on the same level of accuracy as Teoma.

Clustering pages is what other search engines like Teoma are doing already.

In a recent interview in c't magazine, a Google employee (Urs Hölzle) said, when asked about clustering, that they had tried that a long time ago, but they never got it to work successfully. He mentioned two problems:
- the algorithms they came up with delivered about 20 percent junk links for almost all topics
- it's hard to find the right categories and give them correct names, esp. for very generic queries

Of course, just because Google didn't get it to work properly doesn't mean nobody else can. But it's harder than it looks, and it's been known for quite a while.

Although it's still in beta mode, I found Teoma to be a great search engine, and at times, be even better than Google in whatever I was searching for.

For any of you considering paying for this service (none hopefully ;-)) give Teoma a shot.

Given a particular word on a particular website, it's fairly easy to decide if it's relevant or not. How? By looking for links to that website from other websites which mention the same word. That's the idea behind Teoma and a number of other search algorithms. Sites which "unintentionally" get hits for unrelated topics simply don't register on these engines. Link analysis provides much more accurate metadata, because it's based on other people's opinions.

Another problem with metadata in general, of which spam is but one symptom, is the fact that creators of content often have no idea of how their content appeals, or fails to appeal, to other people. Did Mahir have any idea that his name would become a top-ranked search term? Does anyone have any idea how his content should be ranked for a given search term (besides number one, of course)?

What is the number one piece of metadata found in spam messages? This is not spam.

• Unique No search engine comes close in terms of quality search results.
• Useful Regardless of net trends and fads, searching will always be a popular task, for just about every application (business, technical, entertainment).
• Unbiased Google has a strong reputation for delivering fine results first, rather than sites who've paid for "featured" links.
• Up-to-date As we saw in yesterday's story on Alta-Vista, the old-time search engines aren't keeping up. In contrast, google keeps stuff fresh. Any webmaster knows how frequently the google robot hits their sites.
• Usable No BS portal stuff, no "Search for 'Syntax Error: Cannot create HitException'". Just clean, fast, results.

Some sites are coming close in terms of some of these things (e.g. Teoma, Vivisimo, and Alta-Vista's Raging. Hoppefully, new sites will continue to give google a run for their money. But right now google is way ahead and continues to improve without adding unnecessary complexity. Considering how much people pay for net access, which will consist of frequent google visits, I think many people would pay $5-10/month for google if google started charging for general access.

alltheweb.com Let's you search the web, ftp files, images, MP3s and Videos. The results are quite good though not as good as in google. It has support for more languages than google and I use it exclusively to search pages written in my native language(which isn't supported in google). Has the best ftp search.

ResearchIndex Nice scientific literature search engine. Lets you search not only documents but also citations. Keeps cached copies of the documents in multiple formats. Can show related documents or other documents viewed by users that viewed the current document.

vivisimo.com Groups the found documents by topics and subtopics. Nice interface and the sudgested topics are quite reasonable.

www.wisenut.com Similar to vivisimo, but vivisimo(IMO) is beter.

www.searchshots.com Lets you see screenshot of the found pages. Too bad has a content filter and the results are not very good.

www.teoma.com Simple interface. Can group the results by their topic.

ditto.com An image search engine.

webshots.com Not exactly an image search engine. But I've had much better luck finding images there than in any image search engine. Requires you to download a program (windows only) that puts the images as a wallpaper.

The two pages of this article don't seem to be well-related. The first page looks at google-like search engines - Wisenut and Teoma, while the links in the second page fall into a different category altogether. Lasoo doesn't look like anything more than a glorified yellow pages, CURE looks like any other research database out there, and Vivisimo is the least creative of them all, being nothing more than another Dogpile. The first two look promising, but the others are just the same ideas churned out again.

I wonder what would happen if I searched for google in teoma and teoma in google..

The search results are here..

The Google search for Teoma

The Teoma search for Google

google's has my cv, and lots of game dev and cv-related stuff. whereas teoma reveals, er, bugger all. i wont be switching for a while.

Well, if you search for Linux using this thing the first site you get is Debian, not linux.org. (Following that are Freshmeat and Apache, incidentally.)

Google's first hits, on the other hand, are linux.org, linux.com, and RedHat.

Could this be intentional?

teoma google vivisimo

No company that relies on banner ads for revenue is ever going to be successful again, not even when they provide the value that Google's do (they're cheap, and work pretty well, but that's not a real business model, kids). I'll stand by that prediction -- not too brave of me.

GOOGLE MAKES MONEY LICENSING USE OF THEIR ENGINE.

Yahoo! pays to use it (although they didn't buy access to the entire page index, so a direct Google search will often give better results). So do about 50 other major companies. When I say 'their engine' I mean the many Googleclusters in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and (I believe) Herndon, not just the software.

Some of my friends and ex-coworkers work there -- "Nobody at Google ever quits" they say, and aside from contractors, this appears to be true. It is a wonderful work environment and they have filled their cubicles with Microsoft Research caliber PhD's and ex-professors. They are working on image retrieval technologies (not truly useful yet) and have pretty much cornered the search-engine-ASP market. (In fact, since I last talked to anyone at Google about this, they've added ANOTHER 70 PARTNERS!)

The technology rules -- I have converted every single employee at my current company (far from an IPO, but profitable nonetheless) to using the Google Toolbar because it saves so much time. (and they in turn have converted most of their acquaintances...) If things continue this way, not only will they be an attractive investment, but vast numbers of potential investors may habitually use Google the way they use Microsoft's site. If things go REALLY well, even Microsoft may end up using Google for their search services. That's damn good awareness. And that is why I say...

I STILL HOPE THEY DO NOT IPO YET.

Not just because I doubt my erstwhile coworkers will cut me in for friends-and-family ;-) but because the market is atrocious and I, like (I pray) most /. readers, would want to see them rewarded for superior technology and hard work, rather than having a fair-to-middling IPO due to the .com spectres. If revenues continue to increase (and I believe they will -- Google's search engine is lightyears ahead of new entrants like Teoma due to its already being deployed and well tested), a Google IPO in a year or two would probably be a huge hit, as it may catch the economy coming OUT OF a dip.

Marc, Shawn, Chris, and everyone else at Google, you're doing a great job, and I will buy into the company's IPO either way. But I hope Doerr and Brin and Page, or whoever would be making the decision, decide to hold off a little bit!