Teoma, which debuted in the Spring, 2001, is definitely one of the up-and-coming search tools. It was purchased by Ask Jeeves in September, 2001, giving Jeeves' question-and-answer search tool another internet outlet and a database to draw from. Ask Jeeves also acquired Interactive Search Holdings in March, 2004, giving it control of several additional search outlets including My Way.com, MySearch.com, MyWeb Search.com, Maxonline.com and the well-known iWon.com and Excite.com search sites.
Teoma's database remains considerably smaller than Google and Yahoo!, though it has grown to over 500 million documents. The newest version of the search engine adds an advanced search page, greater coverage of the Web, and the ability to set search preferences, among other options.
What Teoma does, it does very well. It offers intelligent grouping of search results into topic groups that focus on exactly what you are looking for. Teoma has a unique method of analyzing links to determine relevance ranking, and it also discovers content hubs that show in the results as "Experts' Links." This helps you quickly locate useful links on your subject - a primary reason to regularly use Teoma in your research arsenal. One of Teoma's best features is its ability to point you to expert links and super sites on your subject. It also has a very useful "Refine" feature which helps you focus your search.
Advanced search options include the ability to limit the words in the title of the page or terms in the URL. Searches can be limited to a specific site, domain, or world region. For the geological search, at the advanced search page use the "geoloc" prefix like this search for Microsoft: Microsoft geoloc : europe. Phrase searching is available by using double quotes around your phrase. Teoma has added some field-searching capabilities and language limits on the advanced search page. While Teoma only displays ten results, you can adjust this and other preferences on the advanced search page.
The Teoma tool provides wonderful groupings - by topic, by sites that have several links in your results, and by "experts' links," which help point you to authority sites on that subject. Teoma has even improved on its ability to find and organize "communities". Teoma has also started providing results with your keyword-in-context. In other words, your search terms are highlighted in the results. It has also started to categorize results.
WiseNut, which debuted in July, 2001, was founded by Yeogirl Yun, co-founder and former CTO of mySimon, one of the first online comparative shopping sites. WiseNut has been purchased by LookSmart, which should give WiseNut the financial footing to grow rapidly, but so far, that growth has been disappointing. WiseNut claims a database of 1.5 billion documents, although it consistently returns fewer records than you expect. It does let you customize settings, like number of results you want on a page, what languages to search, and whether to group pages from the same site together.
Its "WiseGuides" categories are its best feature. WiseGuides are linked by keywords into categories similar to the customized folders that were a feature of the late Northern Light search tool. WiseGuides give you a quick way to zero in on the most relevant material within a search that may turn up hundreds or thousands of results. This lets you see easy patterns and overlapping subjects.
Like Teoma and Google, WiseNut offers the same pared-down query syntax of phrase matching, and no Booleans. WiseNut does offer phrase searching using quotation marks, and WiseNut's preferences page allows a series of display, language, and results grouping options.
WiseNut's problem has been that it has not been regularly updated - its results tend to be out of date with dead links, which is frustrating to researchers. Both Teoma and WiseNut were new in 200land both have since been acquired by larger companies. While Teoma consistently added new features, including advanced searching, WiseNut has not shown great strides forward. That could come at any moment, however. If LookSmart pumps the dollars into WiseNut it publicly said it would, this could be a tool to watch.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Landon Griffith at 08282010
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