Ask acquired Bloglines in February of 2005, but has so far kept both sites separate. However, with the release of a new blog and feed search function Ask has combined some of the technologies of both sites and is offering the feature on both Ask.com and Bloglines.com.
The new Ask Blog & Feed Search gathers results based on the data from the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to Bloglines, according to Ask. So far most blog and feed search engines use focused crawlers to spot content on blogs. However, Bloglines allows its subscribers to essentially tag the blogs that they are subscribed to. This means that Ask will rely on these tags as the basis for determining if a blog or feed is relevant to a specific query. Also, this search function can use the number of subscribers to a particular blog as a measure of how popular it is.
In addition to all of this, Ask will also utilize its Expert Rank technology to fine-tune the search results. Ask has been developing this technology since it acquired Teoma in 2001.
Users can easily filter and sort results as well. A user can limit the results to posts, feeds, or news. The results page will list blogs and feeds in order of relevance, but users can re-sort them by date or popularity. Users who sort by popularity can then sort the results even further by choosing to sort the results in chronological order by hour, day, week, or month.
Results that users like can be saved in their “my saved results” page. Users can also subscribe to the feed by using Bloglines, Google reader, Newsgator, Yahoo!, or just as a barebones RSS feed. Ask also enables users to post selected search results to their own Bloglines blog, Digg, Del.icio.us, or Newsvine.
Ask also recognizes the fact that blogs are more personal and driven by individuals. In response they are giving users the opportunity to use name-recognition capability which allows them to search for active bloggers, displaying links to posts by them or posts about them.
There are additional features as well, though Bloglines offers a wider range of capabilities in its advanced searches.
Source:
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3610156
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