A Look at Ask Jeeves and Teoma - Part 2

Question: In your FAQ's for Ask Jeeves/Teoma's pay inclusion
program (http://ask.ineedhits.com/faq.asp), it states that you
can't change URL's. Why?

Jim: "Because it's considered a new submission. We're not able to
put enough resources against it yet."

Question: So in the future, we'll have the ability to swap out
URLs?

Jim: "We'll see, but I hear you. We are aware of Inktomi's
program."

Question: What's the difference in traffic between the premium
listings and the "regular" search results?

Jim: "Do you mean between Premier Listings (Featured Sponsor) and
Paid Inclusion? There are two differences: 1) You are guaranteed
that your listing will show up; 2) You are guaranteed that it
will show up in a specific location on our page."

Question: Are Premier Listings twice as likely to be clicked on,
for example?

Jim: "Premier Listing is really just an ad. With Paid Inclusion,
you aren't paying for anything other than being included in the
index and then being subjected to the same relevance algorithms
that give us our other results, but with the other benefits that
I mentioned earlier.

"In terms of click ratio, I suppose it depends on how relevant
your site is to a given query. The match rate of a site that buys
ad space on our site is much more significant than one that
purchases via paid inclusion for now."

For more information about Premier Listings, visit:
http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/advertise/premier.html.

Question: Let's say that I have a Web site:
http://myownwebsite.com, and let's say that my goal is for it to
become an "authoritative" site in Teoma. Could you give us some
tips on what we can do to try to be considered by Teoma as an
authoritative or expert site on a particular subject?

Jim: "Our recommendations are as follows: 1) you allow people to
link to you; 2) you offer quality content so that you become
popular among other sites of the same subject (i.e., experts).
Basically, that's it. None of our expert sites or authorities are
manually decided. It's based on our algorithms."

Question: On Teoma, are Teoma and Ask Jeeves results combined?

Jim: "Well, there really is no such thing as an Ask Jeeves
result. There are pre-fab, editorially selected `answers' to
certain queries that may appear at the top of the page if we have
a high level of confidence that we have the right answer. But as
far as the actual search results go, it's all Teoma...and we'll
layer in the Direct Hit click-pop at some point soon."

Question: But Teoma results ARE being shown at Ask Jeeves?

Jim: "That's exactly right. The part of the AJ page that says,
`You may find these search results helpful' has the Teoma
results. They were launched in January (and by no coincidence, we
immediately saw a 30% increase in picks to those results.)"

Question: The "Featured Sponsor" section of Ask Jeeves, is that
the Premier Listings?

Jim: "Yes it is."

(End of interview/chat session)

Let's take a longer look at Teoma

If you haven't visited Teoma yet and performed a few searches,
you need to do so (http://www.teoma.com/). It's a really cool
engine with some very interesting and helpful features.

For example, it's a no-nonsense engine like Google with one
purpose only: search.

When you search at Teoma, you're given three sets of results:

* Results, which are relevant Web pages from the Teoma index;

* Refine, which are suggestions for narrowing your search;

* Resources, which are link collections from experts and
enthusiasts.

So with Teoma, if your search results are too broad, you can
immediately narrow them down by choosing one of the suggestions
in the Refine section.

And, in the Resources area, you'll find "experts" in that
particular focus area. This is an excellent place to find related
and important sites that might be good candidates to contact
about swapping links.

More on Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves is the "question answering" search engine, which puts
it into a class of its own. (http://www.askjeeves.com)

At the top of the search results, you'll see a "featured sponsor"
section, which is their Premier Listing advertisement that we've
discussed previously.

With some searches, you'll see a "sponsored links" section, which
are results currently being provided by Overture. However, on
September 3, Ask Jeeves will be switching to Google for their
paid listings.

Then, you'll find search results from Teoma, followed by a
section called, "Other people with your search have also asked:"
In that section, you'll see additional questions that may help
answer your initial question, with results coming from Ask.com.

Like at Teoma, you can narrow your search down by choosing one of
the search terms on the right-hand side of the page.

Ask Jeeves recently entered into an agreement with Google to
display their Google AdWords in Ask Jeeves results effective
September 3, 2002. Those results will be shown at both Ask Jeeves
and Teoma as "sponsored links." For more information, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline echnology/AP-Ask-Jeeves-
Google.html

In Conclusion

Teoma has taken over the old Direct Hit site, and I believe we'll
see some big things out of this fascinating engine in the future.

Ask Jeeves is as it's always been: unique - a place where you can
go and ask a question and be presented with several possible
answers.

If you haven't submitted your site to Ask Jeeves/Teoma, and if
your site isn't found in the Teoma index, I strongly suggest that
you consider their pay inclusion program and become a part of
their index.