teoma bot

The teoma bot is the web crawler for the search engine Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves). It is a traditional search engine indexing bot that systematically visits websites to gather content for Ask.com's search results. The crawler identifies itself in server logs with user-agent strings like Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma). The bot uses a minimalist approach to crawling; it does not process JavaScript or other dynamic content, focusing instead on efficiently extracting and indexing text.

The teoma bot is visiting your website to discover, analyze, and index its content for inclusion in Ask.com's search results. It is likely cataloging your site's pages and links to determine how they should rank for relevant queries. The crawler often prioritizes informational and academic content, reflecting Ask.com's history as a question-answering service. The frequency of visits depends on your site's authority and content update schedule. This is an authorized activity as part of a legitimate search engine's operations.

The purpose of the teoma bot is to build and maintain the content index that powers the Ask.com search engine. The data it collects supports Ask.com's search algorithms, including its 'ExpertRank' system. While not as large as Google or Bing, Ask.com still serves a niche in the search ecosystem. For website owners, being properly indexed by teoma can increase visibility in Ask.com's search results, which can bring additional traffic from its user base.

To prevent the teoma bot from accessing your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This will prevent your pages from appearing in Ask.com's search results.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Teoma
Disallow: /