Teoma Aims To Kill Google

gwernol writes: "SFGate.com has an interesting article on the relaunch of Teoma's search engine. They are trying to topple Google as the leading search engine. If their technology delivers on its promise then it will at least be some real competition for Google which can only be a good thing."

Alas

[junkster191]

I got all excited and went to test it out. Based on my unscientific and arbitrary dozen or so tests of obscure literary phrases, rare medical conditions, and *not* so famous dead people google gave me much more relevant pages every time. Hmm... I don't care how it is supposed to function theoretically, if it doesn't provide results then I'm sticking to google.

Ask.com?

[slardy]

How is Teoma attached to ask.com (ask jeeves)? When you get search results all the results are linked to this server: http://tm.wc.ask.com/ Did ask.com buy out teoma?

Timezones make April Fools longer

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of timezones, the earliest April Fools can done in Tonga (GMT+13), and the latest April Fools can be done in American Samoa (GMT-11).

Assuming that you use EST = GMT-5 (slashdot's timezone if you're an AC) then this gives the worldwide range of March 31 6:00am to April 2 5:59am. Effectively 48 hours.

Reasons to use Teoma over Google

[firewort]

Reasons why anyone should use Teoma over Google:

1) if they don't cave into the demands of the Co$ and delist sites whose outlook on Co$ is less than positive.

2) if they don't refuse adverts on a very arbitrary basis: they refused non-positive Co$ ads, as well as ads from businesses that sell night vision scopes (and not firearms.)

see:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03325.html - google rejects ads from Co$ critics

http://www.politechbot.com/p-03260.html
google rejects ads from firearm-related merchant, accepts SPAM-WARE advertiser.

Gee, thanks google!

Who? kill google...

[BenTheDewpendent]

Yeah lets see to trump google they deffiantly are gonna need some start up capitol and some extra features. google employs the largest cluster of machines to provided its sites and store its data base on what is most used to be terrabytes and may pettabytes by now. its gonna take some time.. if its not an April fools joke.

Re:I care nothing for Scientology or firearms

[firewort]

I don't believe I claimed that Teoma might be superior- I put forth the idea that Teoma might be worth using if they weren't spineless and indecisive like Google. Because the new Teoma isn't up at the time of this posting, it's a little hard to tell for certain.

Google is a fine search engine, but I much prefer the tools I use to not be influenced by what I consider to be poor politics and poor policies.

What next? France will ask Google to remove any links for neo-Nazi or pro-Nazi sites? Sites that detail history regarding Nazi Germany in any fashion?

Censorship is a slippery slope.

How can I judge what are relevant search results if the search engine is censoring some of the valid results? Certainly, a search engine's job is to display only sites it finds relevant, but out and out censorship should play no role in that task.

Slightly OT: Google and the Google Toolbar for IE

[Joe U]

I know it's an IE thing right now, but the Google Toolbar is one of the more useful browser addons ever.

As an experiment, for a week, I turned off the address bar and used the Google toolbar for everything. I was really impressed by the results.

Turning the address bar into a search engine is a great idea, one that Google should think about enhancing. If done right, a Google Address bar could make the current DNS system much less important, and that's just a start. There are a lot of possibilities with a setup like this.

In the end, I turned the Address bar back on to get an idea of what site I was on at the moment, it's easy to lose track without the URL line. However, I did not get rid of the toolbar, and I use it daily.

Having read the article....

[Metrol]

Teoma is going to have one heck of a time ramping up to the kind of processing that Google is doing, if for no other reason than the kind of money they're going to need to put Redmond's way. Have a look [netcraft.com]. It's no wonder they couldn't put together the financial resources.

Now, let's just pretend that the technology that Teoma is using is roughly equivalent to Google's. Google is up to what now, 7000 servers? That's 7000 copies of Win2k, each including a full Internet hosting license, which is a fair bit more than your usual in house licensing.

Did they write their own DB, or are they fully into the MS world with SQL Server? We're talking about some serious bucks here that cannot be devoted to expanding hardware.

On the other hand, Google can devote 100% of their cash investments to hardware and research. Adding a brand new > 1G box with a couple of monster drives costs maybe $600-$700.