New Blog and Feed Search Makes the Blogosphere More Accessible and Useful
The new blog search service aims to capitalize on the fervent interest in the topics and debates covered by blogs that are not easy to find on traditional online news sites.
Ask.com of late introduced Blog and Feed Search, a new service designed specifically for searching posts, feeds and news published to the "blogosphere community."
Uniquely leveraging Ask.com search technology and subscription data from Bloglines, the world’s leading feed reader, new Ask Blog & Feed Search delivers superior relevance and richer tools than can be found elsewhere. The service is available directly from the Ask.com homepage Toolbox or http://blogsearch.ask.com as well as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com).
Bloglines lets users gather information from their favorite blogs and RSS feeds, and gathers the headlines on a separate web page. This news aggregator also lets you save “clippings” for later viewing. Through this feature, users are actually tagging articles they find interesting.
Ask uses this information in order to identify the best and most relevant weblog news items and articles.
This is also an efficient way of dealing with blog spam, which has become a serious problem lately and enable Ask.com to offer fresher blog search results than those offered by competitors, said Doug Leeds, a vice president of products at Ask.com. Search engines that trawl the Web for blog postings are not necessarily getting the freshest content, particularly given the fact that blogs tend to be speedier posters than traditional media sites, he added.
Like the Google blog search tool, Ask sorts results in order of relevance, not date, although you may ask it to sort by date. We would probably have done it the other way round. You may also sort according to popularity, and distinguish between posts (i.e. individual blog stories), feeds (taken from RSS files and the like) and news (taken from news services like Moreover).
Users can also create their own feeds of posts based on topic or search and can subscribe to the searches on Bloglines and on rival blog or RSS feed readers from Google, Yahoo and others. They also can post searches to Bloglines or Yahoo’s Delicious or Digg.
"On the heels of the re-launch of Ask.com, and recent industry-leading products such as Ask Images and Ask Maps, our new Blog & Feed Search continues our narrow focus on making search better," said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. Blogs are the fastest growing form of content on the Web, and Ask Blog & Feed Search can open up this rich information source to more and more searchers.
Ask.com has also added a preview feature that lets you take a look at the feed before you go to the relevant web page. There is also a pull down menu that lets you subscribe to the relevant feed using Bloglines and other major online news aggregators, and another menu that can be used to post information regarding the story to services like Bloglines, del.icio.us and digg.
Ask Blog & Feed Search takes an entirely new approach to searching the blogosphere.
Instead of Crawling the Web for blog postings to build an index to search like others do, Ask.com is using the index already created and updated by subscribers to its popular Bloglines site for searching, subscribing to, creating and sharing blogs and news feeds.
"On the blogosphere, people provide the best way to discover the freshest, highest-quality feeds – information that is not exposed to crawlers," said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Ask.com. "In addition, this ‘collective human intelligence‘ provides a natural defense against spam, as people typically do not subscribe to low-quality content."
On top of this superior index, Ask Blog & Feed Search applies Ask.com’s unique, world-class algorithmic search technology, including the ExpertRank subject-specific popularity algorithm. Together with popularity data from the Bloglines community, this technology delivers industry-leading blog search relevance.
In addition to better results, Ask Blog & Feed Search offers one-of-a-kind tools, including:
- Search for Posts, Feeds and News within the blogosphere
- Sort by Relevance, Date and Popularity
- Preview the feed by mousing over the Binoculars icon, saving clicks
- Easily export search results to popular web services
- Subscribe to feeds not only in Bloglines but also other services, including Google Reader, NewsGator or MyYahoo
- Post or clip a search result directly to services like Bloglines, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine
- Subscribe to a search and find out within minutes when new content appears on the blogosphere matching your topic
- View related feeds when searching for posts right on the search results page
- Use Advanced Search to hone queries with a variety of options, including the ability to select one or more of the supported languages
Ask Blog & Feed Search is also available on Bloglines, with many of the above features, as well as several unique features designed specifically for Bloglines users:
- Search within or search excluding their subscriptions to narrow queries
- Search for citations to see who is talking about your blog post and what are they saying
- Top Queries for the Past Hour lets you know what is top-of-mind with other Blog & Feed Search users
- Author Related Search shows posts authored "by" a person and "about" a person when queries are recognized as names of people
- In-line Post Preview displays the entire post right on the search results page with original formatting, links, images and even Flash videos preserved
- Mobile Friendly: Search and review results easily on mobile devices at: http://bloglines.com/mobile.
Ask’s blog search engine will cover some 4 to 6 million new blog posts daily, with a total index of about 1.5 billion articles.
The new blog search features will be integrated into Ask.com’s Bloglines site, which competes with Technorati, among others. Ask.com has been working on updated technology and re-branding, including a name change and redesign since it was acquired by Barry Diller’s InterActive last year.
The growing popularity of blogs has made the Web diary and consumer pundit sites an obvious marketing opportunity for publishers and search engines seeking revenue boosts from the surge in online advertising.
Blog and Feed Search is also launching on Ask.com Deutschland; Ask.com Espana; Ask.com France; Ask.com Italia; Ask.com Nederlands, and Ask.com UK.