IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com search engine announced plans to add a blog search feature to its search engine, capitalizing on the growing popularity of and demand for consumer-generated content on the Web.
Ask.com’s blog search uses analysis of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Bloglines, the blog aggregator it bought in February 2005, when the company was still called Ask Jeeves.
The new Ask.com blog search will use Bloglines subscription data to populate its index, which the company says will produce more relevant and better-quality results than simply crawling blog sites. The index will contain about 1.5 billion posts and 2.5 million content feeds, along with news articles from around 7,000 sites.
Users will be able to sort search results by relevance, date or popularity. They can also subscribe to a search query and receive an alert when relevant new content is posted.
Bloglines, a free Web-based RSS reader that lets users subscribe to syndicated content feeds, is the second most popular blog aggregator on the Internet. The service had 160,000 visitors in April, according to comScore Networks. That traffic count lags far behind the most popular blog aggregation site, Technorati, which drew 4.5 million visitors in the same month.
