Another Brand Retirement of Note: Teoma

With all of the focus on our flagship brand changing, we wanted to point out another brand shift we'll be making soon: we are rolling the Teoma brand in to Ask, pointing the Teoma.com domain to http://search.ask.com.

As we've detailed before, when Teoma was acquired back in late 2001, it was a pioneering, 7-person shop that had developed some next-generation algorithms and a promising search engine. Since then, it has served as the heart of the technology underlying Ask Jeeves, and has been the foundation of our resurgence in search. The algorithm, one way we uniquely determine relevance, will be known as ExpertRank going forward.

We have exponentially grown the team, now known as the Ask Search Technology team, over the years. They are still located in central New Jersey, near Rutgers, where Teoma was founded. (Though some AST employees also work in our Campbell, CA office, as Matt Cutts and Microsoft's incessantly cold-calling recruiters also know.) So, the spirit of the original Teoma not only lives on, it is very much still a part of what we do.

At this point, the only feature on Teoma.com that is not on Ask.com is the "Resources", or hubs, pages. But given that this receives less than a 1% click-rate, we don't think many people will miss it, though Gary Price says it is popular in the librarian community...so we'll be sure to revisit that issue when we have time. But with the introduction of the new Ask, the time is finally right to make the move.

So to those of you who still visit the Teoma.com domain , we invite you to make the move with us (except for those scrapers/bots out there in Eastern Europe!). You'll find everything to be eerily familiar...