Note from Gary: This is quite an article about Ask and it’s especially exciting to see Kevin Maney’s focus on Apostolos Gerasoulis (aka “AG”) the co-inventor of Ask Search Technology which is named Expert Rank. Many of you have told me that you’ve seen AG in some of the Ask.com tv ads including the one filmed in a Rutgers University library. A couple of fast facts to clarify a few points in this article since we’ve been posting on Ask and this technology long before I began my employment there. If you had the time to review all five years of our archives you would find most of this info.
+ Teoma, the search technology that many info pros adored, is NOW called Expert Rank and is “what powers” Ask.com.
+ Ask.com (then Ask Jeeves) acquired the Teoma Technology on September 11, 2001, and most of its features like narrow/focus/expansion, what’s now called “Zoom Related Search,” have been part of Ask.com for more than three years. Yes, one feature, and we’ve posted about this before, that offered meta sites related to a search query, is not available. As a member of the library community I remind (o.k. nudge) the execs at Ask about this all of the time in hopes that we will bring some form of it back soon. I often hear from you that this was a feature many of you found useful.
+ Teoma has been the search engine on Ask for five years. Same database, different features.
Personally, I’m also thrilled to see the work of Jon Kleinberg get some attention. We’ve been posting and linking to his work on ResourceShelf since the very beginning of the site. I’ve gone back into the ResourceShelf archives and we’re reposting this brief webliography for those of you who want more on Ask, Expert Rank and Kleinberg.
Reading List
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+ “In conversation with…” Jim Lanzone & Apostolos Gerasoulis of Ask Jeeves/Teoma (2005)
Noted web search expert Mike Grehan chats with two Ask.com execs, Jim Lanzone & Apostolos Gerasoulis.
+ A Longer Look by Mike Grehan into the Teoma Algorithm (16 pages; PDF)
Teoma section begins on page 14. Again, the Teoma algo now called Expert Rank powers Ask.com.
+ For the Techies #1 (1999)
Many of the concepts that underlie Teoma come from IBM’s Clever team. This search product was never publicly released. This paper explains and is one of my all-time favorite papers about web search, period.
+ For the Techies #2
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment
This 1998 paper by Jon Kleinberg is cited in the Brin/Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine paper.
34 pages; PDF.
+ For the Techies #3: DiscoWeb: Applying Link Analysis to Web Search (1999)
This is the first published paper on what would become Teoma and now Expert Rank. One of its co-authors, Apostolos Gerasoulis. Btw, DiscoWeb stands for Discovery Web (not a dancing search engine)
UPDATE: Q&A Interview with Ask.com’s CEO (Source: The Guardian)
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