A Look at Ask Jeeves and Teoma, Part 1

By Robin Nobles

Recently, Jim Lanzone, Vice President of Product Management with
Ask Jeeves, attended a chat session with students from the
Academy, and he answered a lot of very interesting questions
about Ask Jeeves' Web properties.

So, let's look at this interview with Jim, and learn more about
Ask Jeeves and their relatively new search engine on the block,
Teoma.

As Vice President of Product Management, Jim overseas the
strategy, features, Web design, and product development for all
of Ask Jeeves' properties, including Ask.com, Teoma, and Ask
Jeeves for Kids at AJKids.com. Ask Jeeves is a top twenty Web
property and is among the most recognized Internet brands
worldwide.

Jim began by giving some background information about Ask Jeeves
and Teoma.

"Ask Jeeves is one of the leading search engines on the Web, with
more than 16 million unique users per month. We also recently
launched a new search engine called Teoma (Gaelic for "expert,"
in case you were wondering).

"Both Ask.com and Teoma.com are powered by Teoma's search
technology. The difference between the two sites lies in the
design and the features.

"Here's an easy way to think about it: Ask is for `Passengers'
(people who want help searching) and Teoma.com is for `Drivers'
(people who don't).

"Our company makes money by serving advertisements that are
triggered by the searches people conduct on our sites. There are
three main types of advertisements: Graphical (e.g., banner ads),
Paid Placement (Sponsored Links), and a new program called "Paid
Inclusion" (pay to be entered into our search index)."

Is free submission still an option?

Question: Can you still submit to Ask Jeeves if you have a site
that answers questions, like we have been able to do in the past
for free, or do you have to go through pay inclusion to get into
either index?

Jim: "Well, yes, if you want to submit, you need to pay. It takes
special attention, and therefore resources, for us to take a site
rather than simply crawl the Web as usual. But there are special
benefits to paying!

"Our editorial staff is much smaller than the old days, and the
`questions' for Jeeves (what we call the `Knowledge Base'
internally) are not emphasized as much as they used to be, so the
exposure will be more limited...and it may take our editors quite
a while to get to your site."

So, you can still submit your site to Ask Jeeves for free, but it
will probably take a while for your site to make it into the
index.

Jim: "For the search index, there is no free submit (for Teoma)."

Question: Compared to, for example, the free add URL in Google,
the one for Ask Jeeves makes you jump through hoops.

Jim: "That's because it's quite an old program that was developed
for our editors to review."

Remember that Ask Jeeves was established to answer questions, so
you have to "prove" that your site does, in fact, very
effectively answer the question you're going after - which is a
lot more detailed than a simple submission at Google.

What about pay inclusion?

If you submit to Ask Jeeves' and Teoma's pay inclusion program,
your site will get visibility at both sites. The pay inclusion
program is now out of beta, so the subscription period is 12
months.

Benefits of their pay inclusion program include:

* Your page will be indexed within 7 days.
* Your page will be refreshed every 7 days.
* Your page remains in the index for 12 months.

Cost?

$30 for the first URL, and $18 each for 2 through 1000 URL's. For
larger numbers of pages, you can use their batch processing
facility.

Visit http://ask.ineedhits.com/ for more information.

Question: The Direct Hit site has been taken down, and traffic is
being redirected to Teoma. What about the Direct Hit results that
were being shown in engines like HotBot? Are those now Teoma
results?

Jim: "Yes, we still have Direct Hit on HotBot, as well as
BellSouth and InfoSpace. DirectHit.com is redirected to Teoma.
But some partners still have the old DH "pop" (popularity)
results. MSN still has the Direct Hit results.

"We will be merging pop into the Teoma technology sometime in the
near future, but some partners still want it as a "one-off," and
we are open to providing it."

Question: Teoma does crawl sites on its own? Is that correct?

Jim: "Yes, that's correct. Its index is currently featured on
both Ask.com and Teoma.com."

Question: A Web site with good link popularity then would not
need the Ask Jeeves/Teoma paid inclusion program?

Jim: "For a major site, that is probably true. However, for
smaller sites, or sites that refresh their content frequently (or
have many dynamic pages that are difficult for search engines to
crawl), paid inclusion is still a great option if you really want
the traffic. Paid inclusion sites are spidered weekly. Other
sites are spidered monthly, currently."

Question: When paying for inclusion for Ask Jeeves and Teoma, are
the results shared with other partners? If so who?

Jim: "Currently, no. However, we're aggressively pursuing
partnerships that will extend our reach considerably. Not able to
say who just yet, but the usual suspects."

(Continued in Part 2. Contact RobinN@... for the complete
article.)

Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists,
(http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several
thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content provider
for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-
optimizer.com). She also teaches 3-day hands on search engine
marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search
Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).