Last week the newly re-branded Ask sent its longtime mascot, Jeeves on retirement. That all played out with daily shots of Jeeves dreaming and planning his retirement and then finally riding off into the sunset on horseback. In a quieter move, Ask has also retired the search engine Teoma. As such, they have rolled the Teoma brand in to Ask, pointing the Teoma.com domain to http://search.ask.com.

Teoma has been a search technology behind Ask Jeeves search since they acquired it back in 2001. The official Ask Search Blog reports:

"As we've detailed before, when Teoma was acquired back in late 2001, it was a pioneering, 7-person shop that had developed some next-generation algorithms and a promising search engine. Since then, it has served as the heart of the technology underlying Ask Jeeves, and has been the foundation of our resurgence in search. The algorithm, one way we uniquely determine relevance, will be known as ExpertRank going forward."

At this point, the only feature on Teoma.com that was not incorporated into the Ask.com property is the "Resources", or hubs, pages. However they report that because this receives less than a 1% click-rate, they don't think many people will miss it. Gary Price, who recently left Search Engine Watch to work for Ask says it is popular with the librarian community, so Ask reports that they may revisit that at a later date.