This is an interesting piece of news. Apparently Ask.com is going to change the algorithm behind their search engine, relying on user input in addition to their own ranking system. It looks like they've already been collecting some of the data they need to make this switch. The new algorithm is called Edison.

I have confirmed the existence of Edison with Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com. Jim was not able to give me any more comments or details on Edison. So I decided to meet with Apostolos Gerasoulis this morning, and I received some more information about Edison. Here is what I got for you.

1. Direct Hit and Teoma were the original social search engines.
   • Direct Hit which was purchased back in 1999 by Ask, uses click data to determine relevancy for rank. So the more clicks, the higher the click popularity, the higher a page would rank.
   • Teoma uses hubs and authorities to determine relevancy. In a sense, it uses the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine relevancy and show the best results they can.
   
   
   
2. Apostolos explained in his presentation this morning that they will be combining the best of both Direct Hit and Teoma into one engine.
3. Apostolos also explained that they have been tagging for three plus years. So for example, if you do a search at Ask.com, that search query you used, will be associated with the pages you click on Ask.com. So if you search on "cars" and click on the first result, the first result will be tagged as "cars" behind the scenes.

It is my understanding, the new Ask.com search algorithm, code named Edison, will consist of these three components and more.

Ask.com has also said:

"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."

They certainly would have to be doing something more complicated than checking number of clicks, because it would be really easy to manipulate a system like that the same way people setup rings to make false clicks on Google ads. But there's ways of being more intelligent about what's being counted. It's also really interesting to see how they're tagging pages based on what terms users searched for.

While Ask is talking about this publicly, it's perfectly possible Google and Yahoo are doing similar things, such as Google's recent increased use of blogs to make their search results more relevant and timely. Then again, Yahoo is using patented technology so it's also possible this type of algorithm is unique to them. In any case, it will be interesting to see how this causes results to change and how it stacks up to the current search algorithms.