For sake of illustration, let's say you run a for-profit, defensive driving school, and I need to find correct category to submit to. From ODP home page, I would probably select broad category of "Business", because after all, I am out to make a profit, so that seems like a pretty logical choice. The next page I'm presented with has around fifty subcategories. "Training and Schools" sounds right, so I'll choose that one. I'm then provided with various categories of training schools, and "Traffic Schools" is among them, so I'll choose it. This is probably category where I need my site to be listed, so I'll submit here.

Jim: "Because it's considered a new submission. We're not able to put enough resources against it yet."

Question: So in future, we'll have ability to swap out URLs?

Jim: "We'll see, but I hear you. We are aware of Inktomi's program."

Question: What's difference in traffic between premium listings and "regular" search results?

Jim: "Do you mean between Premier Listings (Featured Sponsor) and Paid Inclusion? There are two differences: 1) You are guaranteed that your listing will show up; 2) You are guaranteed that it will show up in a specific location on our page."

Question: Are Premier Listings twice as likely to be clicked on, for example?

Jim: "Premier Listing is really just an ad. With Paid Inclusion, you aren't paying for anything other than being included in index and then being subjected to same relevance algorithms that give us our other results, but with other benefits that I mentioned earlier.

"In terms of click ratio, I suppose it depends on how relevant your site is to a given query. The match rate of a site that buys ad space on our site is much more significant than one that purchases via paid inclusion for now."

For more information about Premier Listings, visit: http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/advertise/premier.html.

Question: Let's say that I have a Web site: http://myownwebsite.com, and let's say that my goal is for it to become an "authoritative" site in Teoma. Could you give us some tips on what we can do to try to be considered by Teoma as an authoritative or expert site on a particular subject?

Jim: "Our recommendations are as follows: 1) you allow people to link to you; 2) you offer quality content so that you become popular among other sites of same subject (i.e., experts). Basically, that's it. None of our expert sites or authorities are manually decided. It's based on our algorithms."

Question: On Teoma, are Teoma and Ask Jeeves results combined?

Jim: "Well, there really is no such thing as an Ask Jeeves result. There are pre-fab, editorially selected `answers' to certain queries that may appear at top of page if we have a high level of confidence that we have right answer. But as far as actual search results go, it's all Teoma...and we'll layer in Direct Hit click-pop at some point soon."

Question: But Teoma results ARE being shown at Ask Jeeves?

Jim: "That's exactly right. The part of AJ page that says, `You may find these search results helpful' has Teoma results. They were launched in January (and by no coincidence, we immediately saw a 30% increase in picks to those results.)"