Is Ask the Next Big Search Engine? - Multiplicity of Products
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Ask offers a plethora of products, including maps and directions to search for locations and businesses in a specific area; a dictionary; Ask for kids; a web based encyclopedia (the only one of its kind for a search engine); Image search; Web search; and Blog and Feed search, a big challenger for Technorati's blog search.
Blog and Feed Search
Ask entered into the world of blogs when it bought Bloglines. Now with its Blog and Feed search, it seems set to take out Technorati's tenacious grip on blog search, a grip that Google has not being able to dislodge much and which ought to be wide open (considering how bad Technorati's branding is).
Ask is offering this new product as a combination of blog search and its Teoma Expert rank technology, which allows blog searchers to find timely content. The basic blog search on Technorati and Google (which still does not have blog search on its home page) enables you to view posts and news on blogs, and sorts most recent posts first by default. Ask's Blog & Feed search, on the other hand, lists results by relevance, increasing the interactivity of the user by allowing them to re-sort by date or popularity.
Add to this the fact that Ask offers a beautiful pop up experience, which shows you the entire post without you clicking on the link. You just need to click the binocular icon and zoom.
Ask is pitching their new blog search as the next step in blog and feed searching worldwide, with top class quality and 1.5 billion blog articles indexed in total. Only blogs and feeds subscribed to by Bloglines users are indexed; this is all in line with Ask's theme of "collective human intelligence."
Ask's Blog and Feed search also includes the following features and tools:
- Easily export search results to popular web services.
- Subscribe to feeds not only in Bloglines but also other services, including Google Reader, NewsGator or Yahoo.
- 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.
My Thoughts
I find that I like Ask a lot. In fact I am considering bumping Altavista off my list of favorite sites and adding Ask, since it consistently gives me relevant results. Also, as I discovered, a lot of experts and other users use them when searching for content and businesses. Write this unique search engine off at your own peril.
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