Note from Gary: This is quite an article about Ask and it's especially exciting to see Kevin Maney's focus on Apostolos Gerasoulis (aka "AG") the co-inventor of Ask Search Technology which is named Expert Rank. Many of you have told me that you've seen AG in some of the Ask.com tv ads including the one filmed in a Rutgers University library. A couple of fast facts to clarify a few points in this article since we've been posting on Ask and this technology long before I began my employment there. If you had the time to review all five years of our archives you would find most of this info.
+ Teoma, the search technology that many info pros adored, is NOW called Expert Rank and is "what powers" Ask.com.
+ Ask.com (then Ask Jeeves) acquired the Teoma Technology on September 11, 2001, and most of its features like narrow/focus/expansion, what's now called "Zoom Related Search," have been part of Ask.com for more than three years. Yes, one feature, and we've posted about this before, that offered meta sites related to a search query, is not available. As a member of the library community I remind (o.k. nudge) the execs at Ask about this all of the time in hopes that we will bring some form of it back soon. I often hear from you that this was a feature many of you found useful.
+ Teoma has been the search engine on Ask for five years. Same database, different features.
Personally, I'm also thrilled to see the work of Jon Kleinberg get some attention. We've been posting and linking to his work on ResourceShelf since the very beginning of the site. I've gone back into the ResourceShelf archives and we're reposting this brief webliography for those of you who want more on Ask, Expert Rank and Kleinberg.
+ For the Techies #1 (1999)
Many of the concepts that underlie Teoma come from IBM's Clever team. This search product was never publicly released. This paper explains and is one of my all-time favorite papers about web search, period.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
