missjoaquim.com-Ask search.pdf

Ask search missjoaquim.com /pembicarainternetmarketingpakarseo/ask-search/ By abdurrachim.har

27/10/2016

Ask

Ask Search Distribution

Ask has a distribution of around 3% of the U.S. search through Lycos, Ask.com, Excite, My Way, and iWon. For a number of years, My Way was the default home page on Dell computers, but more recently Google partnered with Dell.

InterActiveCorp bought out Ask and cross promotes Ask on their other properties such as Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and Match.com.

On the Ask site, they blend Google AdWords ads at the beginning of search results on highly commercial terms. You can also buy Ask pay-per-click ads directly. Ask will display internal ads for a particular search query only if they feel they will make more money from them than from running AdWords ads. Ask also sells banner- based advertising and Kelkoo product ads for some of their more expensive words.

Pay-per-click advertising is covered further in the “pay-per-click” section of this e- book. I probably would not recommend buying Ask ads directly unless you have some compelling reason to believe they would have a significant volume of high- quality traffic for your keywords.

Below is a screenshot of the results part of an Ask results page:

What is Teoma and How Does it Work?

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Teoma is the search engine that powers Ask. In early 2006, Ask killed the Teoma brand and the Teoma.com website, but Teoma is still the search technology used to power Ask.

The core of the Teoma search technology is based upon the idea that society and the Internet consist of tiny communities that self-organize themselves into hubs and authorities.

Hubs and Authorities

An authority is a site that is linked to by many sites and pages covering that topic. A hub links to many relevant topical sites. It is said that a good authority has links from many good hubs, and good hubs link to many good authorities.

If you read search engine papers and information mining topics such as latent semantic indexing and multidimensional scaling, you can learn how some of those technologies are similar to what Teoma does. LSI works at understanding word relationships, but Teoma looks at understanding link relationships between pages within communities.

Search engines create a reverse index of all the terms in their index. For example, maybe 10,000,000 pages have the word cheese in them. After a user searches, Teoma will look at the local term space to find similar terms to cheese and the local communities that surround those topics. Teoma takes a snapshot of the area and bases most of its rankings off of local interconnectivity of that subset of search results.

Below is an oversimplified image. Notice how pages that link to the same pages may be assumed to be related. Also, pages that are linked to from a common page may also be deemed as related.

In the image, “E” may or may not be an authority page, depending on what type of link it is. If a page has a link from only one hub, then it may not be topically related. For example, many hosts or web designers add “designed by” or “hosted by” links on some client websites.

When Teoma is Most Effective

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Teoma is focused on local/topical communities. The best way to rank well in Teoma is to link out to useful related sites and get many related sites to link to your site. Teoma works more effectively at organizing data in larger developed categories where there are many links pointing back and forth to reinforce the structure of a community.

Are Hubs Confusing?

If you are still a bit confused about the terms hub and authority, you can use a free tool I created called Hub Finder to help you understand and visualize what hub and authority pages are. Notice how the hub sites link at multiple authorities.

You can think of online communities in the same way as you think of cities and towns offline. The biggest exception to that analogy is that the online communities can be based around common ideas, hobbies, or points of interest, in addition to geographically.

Effect of Links on Teoma

Teoma does most of its link evaluation after the user searches and primarily focuses on local communities. Several things result from this system:

It is hard to measure link popularity in Teoma. Off-topic links have extremely little effect on Teoma’s search results. On-topic links are exceptionally important.

How to do Well in Ask

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Ask is usually one of the slower engines at picking up new websites. The average time for picking up new sites is about a month and a half.

Since the primary focus of Ask is on local communities, it can take a long time to rank well in it. You will need to find ways to embed yourself in the correct local communities to list well for competitive terms. Social interaction is key.

Ask has two sections to its search engine results pages. The results section is filled with the sites that are considered the authority websites. They also provide a “refine” section. This section lists other terms in the local, associated, term space. For example, cheese may have phrases like cheddar in the refine section.

Due to their small market share, their slow crawl speed, and their reliance on links from topical experts, I would not worry about ranking in Ask. I would probably spend most of my time focusing on the engines with a greater reach.

Ask and Spam

I do not know a lot about Ask’s spam policies, as they rarely come up in discussion due to their small market share.

The Problems with Teoma’s Technology

Since Teoma is so focused on local communities, it is easy for people to spoof false topical authority onto a site by creating many sites within a specific theme that commonly link to the spoof site and other randomized authoritative sites on that topic.

Since Teoma does not provide a ton of traffic, there is less of a strain on their algorithm by people manipulating search results than there is on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.

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