Amn interesting article – Teoma vs. Google, Round Two elaborates on some interesting aspects of Teoma’s search engine. These ideas could be useful for us in BlogStreet.
Teoma offers three kinds of results for each query. On the left of the result page are “relevant web pages” that are similar to what other engines produce. On the right are two other kinds of results: “Refine,” a list of “suggestions to narrow your search,” and “Resources,” which are “link collections from experts and enthusiasts.”
Teoma’s underlying technology is an extension of the HITS algorithm developed by researchers at IBM several years ago. In a nutshell, the search engine goes beyond traditional keyword and text analysis and seeks out “hubs” and “authorities” related to your query terms — a “social network” of related content that forms a “community” about the topic.
The cool thing about Teoma is that its community-seeking behavior is both query-specific, and happens in real time. “Whenever you type in a query, we’re actually looking for the communities after you type the query,” said Paul Gardi, Teoma’s Vice President of Search. “We’re using a method called dynamic rank, because there’s a lot of information you can learn about that page by its friends.”
“We’re going into the communities, finding the link structure of the community using text structure as well,” said Gardi.
