Teomas History and Background

Last Updated: 1/8/2004

Teoma's founder and vice president of research and development is a Professor of computer science from Rutgers University, Apostolos Gerasoulis, Ph.D. Professor Gerasoulis along with his team of computer scientists founded Teoma in April of 2000. Their single goal was to build a search engine that looked "at the Web in terms of subject-specific communities." Teoma had the advantage of joining the search engine wars late in the game. This allowed them to look at what the current engine did right and more importantly, what the other engines did wrong. Teoma.com was not officially launched until a year later in April 2001.

On September 18, 2001 Ask Jeeves, Inc. acquired Teoma, paying over 1.5 million dollars. On January 9, 2002 Ask Jeeves announced its successful integration of the Teoma search technology into Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves reported an increase user satisfaction of 25% and a site abandonment rate of 15% less after this integration. In 2002 Nielsen//NetRatings reports Teoma has grown 175% making Teoma the third most popular search engine in the United States. Darcy Cobb from Ask Jeeves reported on Jan. 8, 2004 that "Teoma's year-over-year growth (2002 to 2003) for the number of searches is 51%."

Teoma 2.0 was released on January 21, 2003. The new version boasts improvements to overall search result relevancy, additions to search tools and more advanced search functions. Teoma currently powers Ask Jeeves primary organic results and receives its paid search results from Google AdWords.

Teoma's Search Technology »

For more information on our search engine optimization and search engine placement services, please contact us at 877-GO-RUSTY or 845-369-6869 or via email at our contact page.