Step Aside Please Google

It seems that after 2 years of web dominance since Google's first appearance

as a beta project at Stanford University, the lovable little blighter faces a

challenger.

Enter Teoma

Teoma, currently in beta testing,

has already been supplying results to AskJeeves for a while now with a positive response. A spokesman for Teoma indicated that he was interested in taking

Teoma down the independent route like Google and not just to use it as a backend search

supplying the 'big boys'.

How it works

Teoma does not work quite like Google. Rather than using a "Page Rank" structure to

decide what is relevant, it collects together (in realtime) a set of all of the pages

on the web containing the relevant key words. Teoma then performs a 'community' analysis

on them, finding out how the pages link architectures relate to each other and decides their importance. After all,

the web does not operate on how many inward links you get, it operates on millions of interlinking related communities.

For example: Lets say we search for "web development". Teoma finds all pages containing those keywords. Now, imagine that all of the pages have a link to evolt.org.

This suggests to Teoma that it is something of an authority in the world of "web development" and thus we get a high ranking.

Teoma also provides a nice folder system for categorising sub-groups of sites which are relevant to your search... so our search for "web development" may turf out sub-folders such as "backend" "web design" "tools" etc...

The lack of dependence on volume of links is also good news for honest coders since it means that the popular practice of google link spamming may become obsolete.