Teoma: New Rival for Google?

• Jul. 25, 2001

As other major search engines fall over themselves to sell out their traffic, drawing the ire of no less a consumer advocate than Ralph Nader, a new batch of search services are debuting that promise a return to the basics, a search engine that finds the most relevant sites. Leading the pack is Teoma, a no frills search tool that delivers great results. 

Like current search champion Google, Teoma uses links to determine relevancy of sites in their index. But it takes it one step further. With Teoma, it scans its index to find sites where the keywords used figure prominently, then ranks sites based on which of these sites link to them. It's search results based on a peer review system.

Like Google, Teoma was the brain child of academics. . It's genesis was a project started in 1998 at New Jersey's Rutgers University.  Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis, who is now the CTO, headed the project. 

Right now, Teoma does have some limitations. The size of its index is quite small compared to Google's, there's no advanced search function and it lacks Google's caching feature. But, that said, the formula seems to work very well and it could help fill the vacuum that's being created as other search providers abandon their core functionality in a desperate search for more revenue.

Is this the rival to Google?
The Register, July 24, 2001