Teoma

» see teoma.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Teoma was the search engine for people who read about search engines. it launched in april 2001, built by a Rutgers professor named Apostolos Gerasoulis and his colleagues, and its pitch was a ranking method that grouped pages into subject communities and measured authority inside each one rather than counting links across the entire web (close enough). among people who paid attention to this, it had a real reputation for quality.

in turkey none of that reached me. by the early 2000s search meant Google, full stop, and before Google it had meant whatever portal your ISP pushed at you. Teoma was a name I would only have run into by reading english-language tech coverage, not by anyone around me actually using it. it belonged to a small tier of also-ran engines that search obsessives championed while everybody else typed their query into the one box that already worked.

Being good was not enough, and it rarely was in search. Ask Jeeves bought Teoma in september 2001, months after launch, for a little over one and a half million dollars, and by january 2002 had wired Teoma's technology into Ask Jeeves as its ranking engine. the brand hung around for a few more years as a standalone site for the enthusiasts, running on the same technology that now powered the bigger name.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

Teoma's idea was called subject-specific popularity, later marketed by Ask as ExpertRank. instead of asking how important a page was on the whole web, it asked how important a page was among the group of pages about the same topic. in theory that meant a small authoritative site about one narrow thing could outrank a huge generic site that merely mentioned it. it was a genuinely different angle on the problem Google had already mostly won.

~ what really happened ~

on february 26 2006 Ask redirected teoma.com to search.ask.com and retired the name. the technology did not die, it just stopped having its own front door. Ask itself limped on for another twenty years and finally shut its search down in 2026, outlasting most of its era while never again mattering the way its parts once did. Teoma sits with [[ask-jeeves]] and [[altavista]] among the search engines that had a better idea than their market share ever showed.

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