Ask Rolls Out Blog & Feed Search
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Written By Reprise Media | June 1, 2006 | Share This
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Coming late to the blog search party, Ask has nonetheless arrived with a blog and feed search engine that can be accessed from both the toolbox on the Ask.com homepage and from a tab in Ask’s Bloglines reader.
From Ask.com, users can search for individual posts, feeds, or news, the last of which is culled from several thousand pre-approved news-related blog sources. Results can be sorted by date, relevance, or popularity - these latter two are ranked with the help of Bloglines’ voluminous subscription data (we’re guessing that subscriber numbers weigh more heavily in determining popularity). In the press release, executive vice president of search technology Apostolos Gerasoulis points out that “this ‘collective human intelligence’ provides a natural defense against spam, as people typically do not subscribe to low-quality content.”
Ask Blogsearch also makes use of the binoculars feature, in slightly modified form. Rolling over the binoculars icon in a result pops up a preview of a blog’s feed rather than a web page, as in the Ask web search results. Users also have the option to subscribe to a feed from blog search results (and not just using Bloglines - Google Reader, Newsgator and others are also represented here), or post the result to a tagging site like Digg or del.icio.us.
From Bloglines, the search works a little differently. In addition to posts and feeds, users can search for citations (to see who’s referencing a blog), and search only within their own subscribed feeds or choose to exclude those feeds entirely. There are a few differences in the results themselves, as well. For instance, click on a little “+” to expand a summary into a whole post. Roll over the “More info” link for a pop-up that shows how many subscribers a feed has and the number of citations for that post. You can also roll over the “preview feed” link to (what else?) preview a feed, by looking at a summary of its five most recent posts.
Not everyone is in love with it (see: Rubel, Steve, although we understand he’s already backing another horse in the blog search race), but at the very least Ask’s blog search is trying out unique ways to reduce junk results (we’re looking at you, Google) and determine relevance - even if all the kinks aren’t worked out on day one. For more. take a look at Chris Sherman’s great rundown or mosey over to Michael Arrington’s review.
Topics: Blogging, Search: Vertical |