There's Blogs (and Feeds!) In Our Search!

If you’ve spent any time in the candy aisle you are probably familiar with one of the best mash-ups in history: combining chocolate and peanut butter to get “two great tastes that taste great together"... the peanut butter cup.

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.

On Ask.com, you'll find the new service under the Blogs & Feeds link in the Toolbox on our homepage. Enter terms to find a wealth of information and options for getting the best of the blogosphere, including:

* World-Class Results: The result of mixing ExpertRank and Bloglines data.
* Three Flavors of Relevance: Search by Date, Popularity, or Relevance (a combination   of the first two)
* Three Sorting Options: Sort by Posts, Feeds or News
* Unique Tools: Including Binoculars to preview the last 5 posts from a feed
* Open Subscription Options: Subscribe to a feed in Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo, or Newsgator
* Open Posting Options: Post a link to Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Newsvine or Digg
* And more....

Meanwhile, over on Bloglines, in addition to the features on Ask.com, we've concocted some specifically for Bloglines searchers, including:

* In-line Previews: See an entire feed, including pictures and videos, directly from the results page
* More search options: Including search citations, search within your subscriptions and even Search Outside of your subscriptions
* More Info: See how many subscribers and citations a feed or post have
* And more.....

Blogs are the fastest growing source of content on the Web, and we hope our new product helps both Ask and Bloglines users to discover and manage this information more quickly than before.

Give it a try and please let us know what you think!

Ryan Massie
Kaushal Kurapati
Ask.com Product Management