Marketing Pilgrim

SEL has word of a new algorithm in development at Ask.com; blending the best of Teoma and Direct Hit (remember them? they had the algo that looked at the number of clicks a listing received).

According to Rahul Lahiri, Vice President of Product Management and Search Technology at Ask.com:

Edison is still in development, so we can’t say too much at this juncture….It’s much more complicated than saying we’re just counting clicks, in the case of DirectHit. The technologies we have, and the patents we hold, go way beyond that. We’re also taking a deeper look at communities and calculating the authorities in those communities. We were really inspired by looking into the universe of user behavior, and what that could tell us, and the social fabric of the Web itself, and what that tells us…Edison itself will roll out over the course of the year, as we improve it and tweak parameters.

I’m glad to see the light bulb go on for Ask.com. (”light bulb”, “Edison”, get it? Oh never mind)