Another Blog Search Engine? … just Ask.com

Blog Search Engine, OR a Blog Search Filter?

After purchasing Bloglines, the much anticipated arrival of Ask.com’s Blog Search service has now arrived. But it is following recent trends of its competitors by defaulting to a sort by “relevance” list.

It is a trend that I frown upon because it is designed to filter out 90% of the blogosphere (ie. probably you). To me it shows a general bias and it’s rather like shooting first and then asking questions.

You can of course click another link to search by “most recent” or by “popularity” (whatever that really means) but to be fair the default setting should be the most recent posts.

Here at Ask we’ve been enjoying two great flavors separately for a while: blogs and search. Our blog connoisseurs are the Bloglines team, who have created the Web’s most popular RSS feed reader. Meanwhile, our search aficionados are the Ask Search Technology team, proprietors of ExpertRank and many cool derivatives thereof.

Well, it’s finally time for a tasty collision: introducing Blog & Feed Search, which combines the rich data of Bloglines and the search technology of Ask.com. Like peanut butter and chocolate, Bloglines and Ask Search Technology compliment each other to solve some key challenges in building a great blog search engine: finding rich, diverse, and timely information published every minute on the blogosphere, without getting overwhelmed with a ton of low quality content.

Instead of sites like this calling itself a blog search engine, perhaps a more applicable name would be a blog search filter? It does however have some cool features such as the ‘binoculars’ mouse rollover view to preview your results before clicking. Another feature that I like is the search by posts, feeds and news links.

Ask.com Press Release:

* 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

Probably its biggest advantage will be leveraging their Bloglines acquisition which has a huge feed resource to draw from, and could give Technorati, Feedster and Google Blog a run for their money. It will be another tool to add to my already overcrowded arsenal of blog search engines.

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