By Heather McLean, 2 April 2002 14:15
NEWS Idiosyncratic web butler-cum-search engine Ask Jeeves has launched a new service which it says will challenge rivals such as Google. Teoma.com was purchased by Ask Jeeves last September. It has been running since Spring 2001 as a beta site, while the technology has been incorporated into ask.com (Ask Jeeves' US search site.) Ask.co.uk will get a similar upgrade later this year. Teoma.com - which went fully live yesterday - allows users to refine searches according to specific areas, popularity and local subject areas. It is designed to check the "authority" of a site to answer a query, ie. its level of expertise and knowledge. According to Ask Jeeves, this produces search results with greater relevance. Teoma has indexed 200 million web pages compared to Google's three billion, so the new site has some way to go before it leads the pack.
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