Who's Zoomin' Who?

It's an immediate gratification society, and search is no different.

Few people are patient enough to use "advanced search" tools to narrow their searches. And sometimes they aren't exactly sure what they want. So most people just go to that mesmerizing white box on our homepage and start typing. They just want to get up and search!

As we've said before, this is why our #1 most used feature has been Related Topics. It's full of conceptually-related topics (or clusters) that offer suggestions to narrow or expand your search.

Today's product announcement, Zoom, is the next generation of Related Topics…so now you can be even lazier and still find what you want!

Zoom is displayed in the right side of the Ask Jeeves results page, categorized into 3 types:
1. Narrow your search ("Zooming In"): view topics that are close to the nucleus or core meaning of your query
2. Expand your search ("Zooming Out"): view topics that are further away from the nucleus but conceptually related
3. Related Names: just to show off…no, really, because they're incredibly useful…you can view names that are conceptually related to the query at hand

People have been pretty blown away by the product in focus groups. It's quite addicting as you start Zooming around.

So everyone wants to know… how did you do that?

I can't tell you but…OK, twist my arm.

By now you know Ask Jeeves search (Teoma) is the only search technology that clusters the web into topical communities in real-time. Zoom examines the relationships between these communities to identify concept clusters that are common or close to the same subject and categorizes them accordingly. This allows us to intuitively understand the meaning of related concepts that current clustering technologies can't.

Try these:

Beatles

The Simpsons

Giants

Afghanistan

And make sure you click the "more" button while Zooming - so you see all the possible suggestions. Pretty sweet.

Zoom On!!!!

Nitin Shetti, Search Technology
Young Mi Chun, Product Management