Ask.com announces new Blog and Feed Search. Ask.com’s Blog & Feeds Search combines the rich data of Bloglines and Ask’s search technology to offer better search results.
It allows a user to search one of three ways: blog posts, RSS feeds, and from around 7,000 news sources. Search results can be filtered by date, popularity, or relevance.
Ask.com added features that may help drive more traffic to blogs. The “Binoculars” feature in the search results gives users the ability to preview the site’s last 5 posts of a feed without clicking through by mousing over the icon. With the “Subscribe” and “Post To” features, users can sign up for RSS feeds and contribute more links to news aggregation services like Bloglines, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine.
Ask.com Blog & Feeds Search lists search results by relevance and not by most recent posts which is what the other blog search services do. The results do appear to be more relevant and less spammy when compared to G’s Blog Search but results are limited to Bloglines at this time.
Ask has also added some more functionality at Bloglines. It now provides the ability to:
A new list of top Blogs & Feeds queries in the past hour are available to those who want to keep up to date on the blogosphere. This is a great way to keep abreast of the latest news for a specific topic you’re interested in.