“Teoma” means “expert” in Gaelic, but then so does ealamh. In any event, the search engine Teoma has reinvented itself again, and they are closer than ever to getting it right. Results are now returned in three categories: Results, Refine, and Resources. The results are incredibly relevant, dare we say more so than Google? Almost. Here’s how Teoma describes the proprietary voodoo behind the curtain:

To determine the authority — and thus the overall quality and relevance — of a site’s content, Teoma uses Subject-Specific Popularity(SM). Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity. In a recent test performed by respected industry publication Search Engine Watch, Teoma’s relevance grade was raised to an “A” following the integration of Teoma 2.0.

However, one major bug persists. Company websites that try to fool search engines into thinking that they are more relevant than they are have long engaged in the practice of posting “mirror sites”. A mirror site is a duplicate of a website, hosted at a different domain. Sometimes a number of mirror sites are linked together in an attempt to aggregate duplicate content and appear more relevant. Google has a system for ignoring the mirror sites that once gummed up its results; Teoma appears not to have a fix for this annoying practice. For example, search Teoma for the term “company names” and the “Resources” result column lists ten websites, seven of them being the identical mirror sites listed below:

ahundredmonkeys.com
naming-company.com
namingcompany.com
name-branding.com
companynamesbusiness.com
hundredmonkeys.com
onehundredmonkeys.com

In the meantime, Google continues to get more and more accurate, as the number one result of a Google search for any of the following phrases reveals:

naming parody
corporate identity parody
corporate merger parody
brand identity parody
name identity parody
visual identity parody
branding system parody
naming systems parody

UPDATE 6/18: Thanks to everyone in the search engine watch community who helped alert Teoma and their parent Ask Jeeves about this problem, which Teoma has now fixed.