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Google To Gain a Rival?
markpapadakis writes "Seems like Google got itself a new rival, which seem to have the potential to actually challenge successfully our beloved'G'. hTeoma Technologia launched a beta version of its search engine which enhances the link analysis idea, borrowing some ideas from Google and extending it to recognise 'communities' of subjects."
If you spent $300 million researching that new way to build a house (granted, I don't know how much Google spent researching indexing topics) , and then you started charging to build houses for people lets say, 300% faster and with 200% more strength at the end, would you want some other company coming in and stealing your process that you spent $300 million developing? How would you plan to recoup the research costs? Would you even spend the money reseatching in the first place if you KNEW that it would just get ripped off and you wouldn't be able to get any of that research money back because of competition? Funny, patents actually are good for innovation.
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Hmm. I use Google because it finds what I want faster, more efficiently and more accurately than any other search engine I've used.
I love the clean simple fast interface. I love the lack of flashing banner ads. I love the relevance of the text based ads, and the differentiation between those and my search results. I love the categories, and that half the time it'll show me a category listing exactly what I'm after, as well as the normal list of sites. I love the fact that I can have Google in Dutch, despite not speaking that language. I love the site: tag and the difference it makes when looking for UK sites or for something on a specific website. I love the cache and how it insures me against the aging web. I love the sheer breadth of material available. I love the approach and insight of the company, how it focusses on searching, making searching easier, and on being good at searching, and doesn't get distracted by obscure business models. I love the way that occasionally they switch out the normal logo for one that celebrates a given day, and then links that logo to a search result that is relevant.
Oddly enough, the fact that they're running on x thousand PCs running a free operating system doesn't really impact on me at all. I have immense respect for the engineering involved, and for the responsiveness of the site, but I also wonder if a hardcore IBM mainframe might have been cheaper overall.
If MS bought Google, I would still use it. If they started showing banner ads, popups, forcing you to hold a Passport account, prevent non-IE browsers viewing the site, then no, I wouldn't use it.
Right now there is no search engine that comes close to the beauty of Google. I recognise that beauty from a technological perspective, irregardless of the back-end OS being used.
~Cederic
I just decided to go take a poke around, and as a test, I decided to perform a search on linux mips. (I've been browsing around recently and doing a bit of hacking on it lately, and I know which sites I found the most relevant for it.)
The results, currently, are pretty similar. The first link on the page pointed directly to the Linux/MIPS HOWTO, which I've been referring to quite often recently. Everything else is quite similar down the rest of the first 10 results as well.
Google still has it's advantages over Teoma at the moment though:
It's one of those things that quite frequently are useful when you're searching for something: instead of landing on the main page of the site (if that contains your search terms, and is of course linked more often), you can go directly to the part of the site that addresses exactly what you're looking for.
I really hate it when a site that I want to go visit has pulled it's content or moved it around. But if I'm doing a search on Google, or I even know the last known address of a page, I can just head over to the Google cache and often pull up exactly what I'm looking for, even if the content has been moved or deleted on it's original server. Sites, unfortunately, do vanish from time to time. It's always nice to be able to access that content when you need it most.
Anyway, that would just be my whole 2c on it.
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
I spent a good bit on an adword compaign that picked theKompany and other KDE keywords following theKompany's claim that such competitive advertising was illegal. Needless to say the KDE camp went all out, hit spamming my ads, I went though around 10,000x the number of impressions/hour I was supposed to. Google staff was prompt, courteous, fixed the problem, tracked the spammers back to germany (?) and refunded my money.
As for credibility, they'd be one company that I'd be willing to give my email address to, knowing that they get it and won't be sending me "Important Updates" every month.
Competition is great, but let's not forget the good that Google has done. We need a well funded company to fight off things like the Altavista patent lawsuits on searching.
I don't understand why some folks are so virrulantly anti-google. The flack they took for putting up the deja archives who totally unreasonable seeing as they had barely got the archives out from under deja.com's decaying body. And their new image search is damn cool.
I've already discovered Vivisimo, which is a nice step up from the meta-search-engine garbage of yesteryear. (Disclaimer: I go to CMU, which developed much of the technology behind Vivisimo, but I personally didn't work with it.) Not only does it sort links by relevance, it also categorizes results. I found it very useful when doing a research project last year -- searching for "Japanese Women" on even the most finely tuned search engine turns up pages of results that can be diplomatically called "non-academic."
I doubt it's a replacement for Google, but I recommend it the next time you're searching for a topic that might have several different meanings.
For more information, click here.
The near word is implicitely in every search-- pages rank higher when the search terms are found near each other.
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Well I did read this (yes, I actually READ the referenced article before posting):
"Currently in beta, the site is primarily intended to demonstrate Teoma's technology to potential partners or buyers."
How long do you think, assuming that this new technique is valid, will it take for Google to catch up and provide similar results?
They already have 5 of the 6 requirements ( as I see em):
1. Existing, proven, scalable infrastructure
2. Gob-loads of search engine experience && the programmers/net admins to back it up
3. A better name (Marketing, sadly, does count)
4. ~1.3 billion pages already 'spidered' and waiting to be re-munched using any technique they deem appropriate
5. A lot of high-paying corporate customers (Yahoo!, RedHat etc) which helps pay for everything... and lets face it... money talks.
ALl they really need is an algorithm.... whish shouldn't be a problem from the guys that revolutionized searching in the first place.
My $0.02
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
I don't trust search engines that don't let me get lucky... um... feel lucky...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
Oh, and it doesn't seem to have indexed as much of the web as Google yet (admittedly, tested using the not-very-scientific method of searching for myself and my site), but I guess that'll come with time.
I find it quite nice that this search engine totally ignored my robots.txt and scanned my entire site anyway. How can a search engine, so friggin complex and monstrous, ignore the basics of spider etiquette ?
I guess it's time to rename my directories again.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Most search companies don't make their revenue from their internet sites. Look at google.com. They make a ton of money selling their search software to companies. At 1,200 a month per company that wants to use it. Sounds like a pretty good business model to me.
This teoma, I'm sure, is just trying to attract clients. Just wait, they'll get ads soon.
"i blew a booger that i'd swear had it's own spinal cord" "OUCH" Caroline's Spine
#quoted from the page ... please read the page when you have the time ...
, first. Google examines link structures all over the web. By doing so, it can give every page a popularity rating known as "PageRank" (named after Google cofounder Larry Page). When you do a search, URLs with high PageRanks are more likely to be listed first. However, this will only happen if the pages also match other criteria, such as containing your search terms or being identified as being relevant to your search terms by analyzing the context of links.
Teoma operates in an opposite fashion. When you do a search, Teoma looks across the entire web to find pages that contain your search terms or which are considered relevant to those terms based on link context. After finding a matching set of documents, which it calls a "community, Teoma then examines the links between just this set, to determine which are the most popular.
#end quote.
I don't see how this can infringe on any patents, unless google patented the method of ranking pages by external linkages (can they patent that?).
-Shaunak.