Ask.com to run blog searches

Ask.com launched a new blog search service on Wednesday night which aims to capitalise on the fervent interest in the topics and debates covered by blogs that aren't easy to find on traditional online news sites.

Instead of crawling the web for blog postings to build an index to search as other sites 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.

Doug Leeds, a vice president of products at Ask.com, said "this will reduce blog spam significantly" and enable Ask.com to offer fresher blog search results than competitors. Search engines that trawl the web for blog postings aren't necessarily getting the freshest content, particularly given the fact that blogs tend to be speedier posters than traditional media sites, he added.

Leeds added: "Topics [on blogs] are evolving there even faster than on mainstream news."

On Ask.com's new blog seach site, users can sort results by relevance, most recent and popularity in Bloglines, which Ask.com bought in February 2005 when it was still known as Ask Jeeves.

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.

The new blog search features will be integrated into its Bloglines site, which competes with Technorati, among others.

Both Google, which acquired Blogger in 2003, and Yahoo! launched their blog search sites 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.

Ask.com has been working on updated technology and rebranding, including a name change and redesign since it was acquired by Barry Diller's InterActive last year.

Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com