Teoma search engine
Search engine Teoma kicked off a solo career this week, to praise of being a Google-killer. (This is much in the way that overly excited movie critics say things like, "'Independence Day' is even better than 'Star Wars!' ") Teoma takes its name from Gaelic, proud tongue of the Highlanders. "Tẹma" means "skillful, expert, apt, dexterous." For building up a hacker fan base like Google's, made up of so many "Highlander" fans and their "Quake" clans, Celt appeal is a good way to go.
Say "Tẹma." See the fog rolling over the sheep farms beyond Hadrian's Wall and silencing the melancholy howl of the Loch Ness Monster.
Unfortunately, on its way to the Web, Tẹma somehow became Teoma, with no accent. You might mistake it for a made-up word, created in a marketing laboratory where Latin syllables are bonded together in new ways. When you consider that merely including Scottie The Search Terrier or even an animated haggis could give this page personality and therefore instant cult status, it's disheartening to find Teoma taking the coolly-efficient route instead. Their page features the buzzwords "results, refine, resources" and graphic design that looks like it was done by General Motors.
Enough about Teoma's marketing — we now move on to its computerized brain, and find it loopy, for the time being. What Google does so well you don't notice, Teoma is still grappling with clumsily, making the case that Google is a hyperadvanced computer intellect in comparison.
Northern Light, which enjoyed a brief reign of hotness before Google took charge, was handy in that it threw up lists of interesting related categories to one side, so as to help you narrow search results. Teoma tries the same thing, only to come up with odd choices. One of the suggestions for the word "Google" is "Mit, Die." (Though, to be honest, typing "Teoma" into Google summons the category "World > Polska > Biznes > Budownictwo > Klimatyzacja wentylacja chlodnictwo.")
Typing "Medicine" results in some good narrowing-options, such as "Veterinary Medicine" and "Alternative Medicine." Teoma's claim to search supremacy is in basing its results on authoritative links, rather than utterly democratic links from just anyone (Google's method). So I decided to ask a question seeking specific medical advice. You can't just trust any highly-linked "expert" when your life is at stake.
"What medicine should I take for my leprosy?" was the question.
Link number one was something written by William Morris, 19th century typesetter and all-around good guy. Other advice relied heavily on testimony from the Book of Mark. Rounding it out was a link to one of those renegade biologists convinced the AIDS-HIV connection is a fraud. Help for my nodulating, peeling flesh was nowhere in sight, and the only narrowing options offered were "Hiv Aids" and "Healing, Miracles."
Other, more reasonable searches ... well, many other searches were fine, but the results were not really all that, nor a bag of chips. While semi-obscure searches for early-'80s Infocom computer games and Star Trek episode titles produced useful results, the site fell short of recreating the Google Effect. That is, of course, the utmost unity of page title and search request that has made it unnecessary to remember Web page addresses.
Google offers an "I Feel Lucky" button because, by describing a particular place, you can trust to get a smooth ride there. But Teoma is as shaky as "Crazy Taxi." During a test of Teoma's ability to arrive at sleepy Southern California cities and institutions, it found "City of Thousand Oaks" but came nowhere near "Ventura County Superior Court."
The absence of Google's cache files (which mean you never have to leave Google's super-boffo servers) was keenly felt. Also missing was Google's category system, its suggestions for correcting misspellings — and that feeling of computing whimsy and good-naturedness that's all too rare in the dot com world, but present in the Googleverse's Zeitgeist articles and recent discussion of PigeonRanking.
Teoma does get thumbs-up for a "search for this phrase" checkbox that ends the use of quotation marks in our time.
Google trumped the messy Ask Jeeves when it showed that all humans really want from their search engine is a genie that will answer a single request really, really well. Teoma is just warming up, and may soon gain IQ as it mulls over all the sites it has collected and coalesces them into meaningful patterns. In the time being, could someone please do something about the front page?
— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)
