How boring the field of search engines has become - it is rather like watching Ferrari win yet another Grand Prix. The champagne always goes to Google. Spare and zippy, it can do no wrong, attracting the kind of widespread and relentlessly positive coverage that must make Altavista, Yahoo!, Alltheweb and other rivals want to spew something other than facts.
'The champ', 'perfection', 'one of the seven wonders of the Web', the critics rave. Very soon, someone will say it is better than sex.
Maybe they already have - just ask Google or, possibly, a competing search engine founded in 2000 called Teoma. Like Google, Teoma looks pretty tame at first sight, offering a mostly blank page broken up by a few bright colours.
A clue as to what makes Teoma different lies in its name, which is Gaelic for 'expert', and the search engine's slogan: 'search with authority'. This means that, if you harness it, you should supposedly avoid falling prey to the lies, misinformation and hogwash rife on the Web.
The mathematician and baloney-basher who founded Teoma, Apostolos Gerasoulis, says: 'We are constantly amazed at the amount of junk information that lives on the Web. It is strange and distressing that people would try to contaminate the Internet with bad information. The proliferation of this makes it very important for a search technology to be able to discriminate between the good stuff and the bad stuff.'
So how does Teoma achieve this?