Teoma is a search engine that was a search engine founded by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis in 2002 at Rutgers University. I personally like Apostolos Gerasoulis very much and think he is a serious genius. I also like the technology behind the search engine.
On September 11, 2001(yea, I know), Teoma was acquired by Ask Jeeves in order for Ask Jeeves to focus more on competing with Google, but I wasn't confident. Eventually Ask Jeeves was rebranded as Ask.com and then Ask renamed the Teoma technology as ExpertRank and code named it project Edison. As you know, I think they failed and you can read about that more over here.
Yesterday I learned via a Sphinn that Teoma.com was relaunched. Try is at Teoma.com and you'll see. A blog asked IAC why and IAC said:
As we announced in November, we are focused on building the best service for answering questions and delivering the best results for searches posed as questions on Ask.com. We re-launched Teoma.com in mid-April to provide a simplified interface for everyday keyword web search. Teoma.com's organic results will be similar to, but not exactly the same as, those on Ask.com, primarily for testing purposes, but also to provide a more simplified search experience.
So do the results differ from Ask.com? They do. Try both out but essentially, they should be similar minus all the paid content Ask pushes on their home page and all the ads you see on both.
Is this a big deal for Ask or IAC? I doubt it. I still think they should donate it back to Rutgers so Apostolos can get back to some serious work.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.