Mike Grehan, one of the most diligent and intuitive people in the search marketing industry, has conducted a fantastic interview with some of the top technology & business people at the Ask Jeeves engine. Ask Jeeves is currently the #4 player behind Yahoo!, Google & MSN, but they have more than 30 million regular users across the US & UK. They also power the Teoma engine - a specialty search property that is beloved in the tech community (including SEOmoz and our tools).

I've taken away some of the most important points from the conversation:

Talking about Teoma:

There is some debate about this. I think both of them were independently discovered. Has PageRank influenced Google? The answer is: later, yes. Have they implemented PageRank? The answer is no.

On the use of specific tecnologies at Google:

The importance has diminished because PageRank is just one piece of the ranking algorithm over there. The ranking algorithm is so much more complex now. And PageRank is just used when they want to break ties.

I'm sure that they've not implemented Kleinberg's algorithm. But I'm also sure that they have created some kind of local implementation based on anchor text.

They've been very, very solid for the last few years. I think the biggest improvement they've made is anti-spam inclusion and consistency. But what surprises me is that they haven't used subject specific popularity, even though they know it's important.

On the possibility of a new player in the search market:

So, people ask me: Who's going to be the next Google? And I say, it's like asking who's going to be the next Beatles. It's never going to happen. I think anyone trying to get into this space, general purpose search, I(sic) going to have a problem.