What is Teoma and How Does it Work?
Teoma is the search engine that powers Ask. In early 2006, Ask killed the Teoma brand and the Teoma.com website, but Teoma is still the search technology used to power Ask.
The core of the Teoma search technology is based upon the idea that society and the Internet consist of tiny communities that self-organize themselves into hubs and authorities.
Hubs and Authorities
An authority is a site that is linked to by many sites and pages covering that topic. A hub links to many relevant topical sites. It is said that a good authority has links from many good hubs, and good hubs link to many good authorities.
If you read search engine papers and information mining topics such as latent semantic indexing and multi-dimensional scaling, you can learn how some of those technologies are similar to what Teoma does. LSI works at understanding word relationships, but Teoma looks at understanding link relationships between pages within communities.
Search engines create a reverse index of all the terms in their index. For example, maybe 10,000,000 pages have the word cheese in them. After a user searches, Teoma will look at the local term space to find similar terms to cheese and the local communities that surround those topics. Teoma takes a snapshot of the area and bases most of its rankings off of local interconnectivity of that subset of search results.
Below is an oversimplified image. Notice how pages that link to the same pages may be assumed to be related. Also, pages that are linked to from a common page may also be deemed as related.
In the image, "E" may or may not be an authority page, depending on what type of link it is. If a page has a link from only one hub, then it may not be topically related. For example, many hosts or web designers add "designed by" or "hosted by" links on some client websites.
When Teoma is Most Effective
Teoma works more effectively at organizing data in larger developed categories where there are many links pointing back and forth to reinforce the structure of a community.
You can think of online communities in the same way as you think of cities and towns offline. The biggest exception to that analogy is that the online communities can be based around common ideas, hobbies, or points of interest, in addition to geographically.
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