Search engine Ask has launched a news website entitled BigNews in collaboration with community information site Digg…
A joint project by Ask and Digg led to the opening of a news aggregation site called “BigNews.”
The company, whose parent company InterActiveCorp is having troubles of its own over plans to split off its different brands, enters a crowded field with more established news aggregators like Yahoo, Microsoft, and even Google, as well as sites like Digg and Topix.
No fanfare accompanied the debut of BigNews, which fills a gap in services provided by Ask. The difference is that it integrates voting with what it calls “BigFactor.” BigNews is like Yahoo News or Google News except it is broader — it includes video, images, and blog posts related to each story.
Digg is one of the web’s most popular social book-marking sites, through which users are able to “digg” stories they like and share them with other users – a feature on which BigNews capitalizes.
BigNews uses an algorithmic method to find stories that factor in four areas: breaking news, impact on sites and blogs, associated multimedia, and discussions of the topic.
“If it is new, generating buzz, and has pictures, it could be a BigNews candidate.”
You can use a source filter to search for stories based on geographic region and track stories via the site or RSS.
The top stories on the site Thursday afternoon were Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dropping out of the race, the Shuttle Atlantis launch, U.S. Defense Secretary defending NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, two studies concluding that biofuels are not so green, and a Utah couple and their dog rescued after being stranded for 12 days in the snow.
By contrast, Romney, Atlantis, and a story on a baby found alive amid the wreckage of a tornado in Tennessee led on Yahoo News, which was similar to news on the MSN and AOL portals. Google News led with Romney, mob raids in Italy and the U.S., and a standoff between police and a gunman in Los Angeles.
If you mouse-over the “BigFactor” vote you will see a score. It also shows a quick rundown on how the story rates according to criteria like how new the story is, how much discussion has resulted from the story, and other measurements.
BigNews feeds in top stories on Digg as well as Digg stories with no votes – so you can be the first to vote on them. Click “track” and you can subscribe to the newsfeed or put it in “MyStuff.”
Ask calls that ranking method the BigFactor. Category pages for news rank stories in order of their BigFactor, but the Top Stories section is not. Instead, it assembles a snapshot of major stories from all categories.
Limited filtering currently available allows people to limit what they see by geographic region. Someone who only wants to see stories from Asia or Africa enables this with the Source Filter.
Next to each featured story, Ask offers a Track button. Visitors can keep up with the story through the BigNews My News feature, or one of several feed readers linked from Track.
Through the site, users can monitor stories and follow their progression over time, discover the top videos and the most popular people in the news, and get additional background information on searches, among other things.
It provides category clusters and allows users to browse by “top Diggs” and “no Diggs,” while also containing a Blogviews area that highlights the latest posts from selected blogs.
“According to Ask, BigNews already has nearly 10,000 news sources available to it.”
The search engine describes the services as a means of helping internet users locate and track the “most important and most talked about stories in the news.”
Ask touted BigNews for people who like to find many viewpoints, and “not just stories from the wire services.” But quickly scanning the BigNews front page shows four sources dominating the content: New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, and MSNBC.
BigNews does place a lot of news at one’s fingertips, keeping in line with the philosophy of other Ask features and services.
“There is a lot to see for news junkies, and links out to blogs and additional content everywhere, making it worth a visit. Maybe even a bookmark.”
You can get to the site typing in — http://news.ask.com.