"On the heels of the re-launch of Ask.com, and recent industry-leading products such as Ask Images and Ask Maps, our new Blog & Feed Search continues our narrow focus on making search better," said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. "Blogs are the fastest growing form of content on the Web, and Ask Blog & Feed Search can open up this rich information source to more and more searchers."

Ask Blog & Feed Search takes an entirely new approach to searching the blogosphere. First, instead of crawling, Ask Blog & Feed Search harnesses the subscription data of hundreds of thousands of real people who use Bloglines to create our search index.

"On the blogosphere, people provide the best way to discover the freshest, highest-quality feeds -- information that isn't exposed to crawlers," said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Ask.com. "In addition, this 'collective human intelligence' provides a natural defense against spam, as people typically do not subscribe to low-quality content."

On top of this superior index, Ask Blog & Feed Search applies Ask.com's unique, world-class algorithmic search technology, including the ExpertRank subject-specific popularity algorithm. Together with popularity data from the Bloglines community, this technology delivers industry-leading blog search relevance.

In addition to better results, Ask Blog & Feed Search offers one-of-a-kind tools, including:

-- 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

Ask Blog & Feed Search is also available on Bloglines, with many of the above features, as well as several unique features designed specifically for Bloglines users:

-- Search within or search excluding their subscriptions to narrow queries
-- Search for citations to see who is talking about your blog post and
what are they saying
-- Top Queries for the Past Hour lets you know what is top-of-mind with
other Blog & Feed Search users
-- Author Related Search shows posts authored "by" a person and "about" a
person when queries are recognized as names of people
-- In-line Post Preview displays the entire post right on the search
results page with original formatting, links, images and even Flash
videos preserved
-- Mobile Friendly. Search and review results easily on mobile devices.
Visit http://bloglines.com/mobile

Blog & Feed Search is also launching today on Ask.com Deutschland, Ask.com Espana, Ask.com France, Ask.com Italia, Ask.com Nederlands, and Ask.com UK.

About Ask.com

A leading search engine on the Web, Ask.com combines world-class search technology with one-of-a-kind search tools to help people get what they are looking for faster. Ask.com sites include Ask.com US (http://www.Ask.com ), Ask.com Deutschland, Ask.com Espana, Ask.com France, Ask.com Italia, Ask.com Japan, Ask.com Nederlands and Ask.com UK. Additionally, Ask.com syndicates its search technology and advertising units to a network of affiliate partners. Ask.com is a division of IAC Search & Media, a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI - News).

Source: Ask.com

Source: Wired News