Ask.com, which owns the most popular stand alone web based feed reader, Bloglines, has just rolled out its long awaited new blog search engine.
Ask/Bloglines has been the subject of a considerable number of jokes over the last year, after promising a blog search engine last summer. The new engine should put those jokes to rest. And the company is taking the product and the launch very seriously – Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone walked me through the product personally earlier this week.
The search engine has two separate user interfaces. It can be found on the Ask.com home page (link to blog search on the right sidebar) as well as Bloglines. The underlying engine is the same, although the interface and functionality is slightly different on the two sites.
Ask.com Blog Search
Searches can be conducted by “posts”, “feeds” or “news”. The news option conducts a search from 7,000 pre-approved blog and news sites to reduce noise.
Results can be narrowed to a specific period of time (anytime, last hour, last week, etc) and can be sorted by relevance, date or popularity. “Popularity” is determined based on the their “ExpertRank” algorithm and several sources of Bloglines data, such as subscriber count, links, citations, etc. A blog with more links and more subscribers on Bloglines will have more relevance than other blogs. “Relevance” factors in both popularity and freshness to give meaningful recent results.
There are a number of other features worth noting. Feeds related to the query are listed on the right sidebar, along with RSS information for subscriptions. Each search result contains additional options as well: a binoculars graphic (scroll over for popup with last five posts from result), “Save” (save result to a clipboard), Subscribe (to a feed reader) and Post To (Digg, Delicous, Newsvine etc.).
Advanced search features are accessed via an javascript drop down menu at the top of the screen.
Bloglines Blog Search
Bloglines is using the same back end search engine as Ask.com, although the interface and feature set has notable differences. A key feature is a “+” button next to each result. Click on the button and the full post is presented with original formatting (not quite the original formatting actually, but pretty close).
Another difference – each result has a “more info” link that shows the number of bloglines subscribers for that blog and any citations for that post.
My Thoughts on Relevance:
There is a big need for the equivalent of Google Page Rank for blog search relevance. Link analysis on a post just doesn’t work – the content is too fresh to develop meaningful link analysis results. There are now three experiments going on with relevance: Technorati bases relevance solely on “authority” of the blog, which is calculated solely on unique inbound links to the blog itself. This works much of the time, but can break quite easily. TechCrunch, for example, can be the highest rated blog on just about whatever I write about, regardless of whether I know anything about it. If I write a blog post on a political issue, for example, it will appear at the top of results even though I have no qualifications for doing so. Bloglines is taking a different approach, by factoring in a number of statistics such as Bloglines subscribers, link analysis and other information. This may eliminate or reduce the non-topic-specific Technorati authority problem. Sphere is making an effort to assign real authority to a blog on a given topic. They look at links in and out, as well as a semantic analysis of the blog itself. Theoretically, on Sphere a blog that is relevant in one area won’t be relevant in another. It’s a good theory and may work over time in practice as well. But the blog search relevance battle is far from over, and I look forward to new experiments over time.
looks great. i wonder if they’ll hire a few designers anytime soon, and go about making bloglines a little less ugly.
I agree with Kyle, but I hope this gives better results than Google’s blog search. I’m frankly quite disappointed with Google’s blog search, the results are never what I look for and I find that I get better results when I simply add “blog” to a normal google search.
Wow, even Ask has a blog search engine now. It’s fast, but I find the UI clunky. One thing I don’t get. Del.icio.us = Yahoo. Yahoo = Ask’s competitor. Why let users save to del.icio.us? Some Greasemonkey hacker should add other options there. I’ll volunteer my Simpy for starters.
Hi Otis,
Notice we even link directly to Yahoo and Google in our “Subscribe” button. We are confident that when you make a better product, people will come back and use it again, even if, or especially if, you let them use it in ways that make sense for them. We also think this is a great precedent. (Are you listening IE7 team? ).
Also, Michael, thanks for the great write-up. I want to just clarify one item in your post while I’m here. We are not relying solely on Bloglines subscription data for relevance. We combine our ExpertRank techonology, freshness and Bloglines subscriber data to rank the results. We think this is a completely different approach from Technorati or anyone else out there today.
Doug Leeds
Ask.com Product Management
Doug:
Thanks for the quick answer.
Regarding ExpertRank – is there any information about it available, other than what’s on http://about.as...echnology.shtml ?
Advanced search features are exposed using JavaScript but not Ajax. There are no additional calls to the server when viewing the drop-down menus.
1. The binocular feature is sometimes useless, as it only shows you the most recent items on the page that have been spidered, not the post in question… this is important because what use is a preview feature if it doesn’t give more information about the stuff I’m looking for. They should be using a cached version.
2. The line just below the link to the post or site is strange. Sometimes it tells me where the site was found, other times it doesn’t. This is frustrating when I see a site with a comment below it I’d like to know who made the comment, sometimes it just says “found 5/25/06″. Furthermore when a site is listed, there is no direct link to the site, which seems silly.
3. I like the popularity option, but I’d also like to know what defines it. Why hold the numbers back? The best part of Technorati is knowing exactly how many blogs/sites/feeds etc. link to that post or site.
Otherwise, it’s looking good. I hope they really support this and make it a champion, as far as I’m concerned the race is wide open for best blog search, and blog search is becoming increasingly important in finding relevent, timely, info.
PS: Mike, how can you even mention sphere without mentioning how polluted their results are with spam? I’ve totally given up on being able to find anything there.
Niall, good point. fixed.
Hi! I’m like this site. Thanks for the quick answer.
a great idea to add to a blog search feature would be giving relevance in the search query itself BY the searcher
eg: vista product launch = microsoft, technology
the first phrase would be relevant to the search itself and the second after = would ONLY target blogs that talk solely about say microsoft and technology, which I guess ExpertRank should figure some way out of categorising while crawling the blogs in the index.
This would give some really relevant search, rather than every jimbo who writes something about vista alongside CPC ads.
Just my thoughts.
Off topic: I just noticed your Feedburner stats are at 113K today. Then I noticed mine are also up by 50,000. This is one glitch I hope they don’t fix!
@Pete
Your feedburner image is way cool, had me fooled for 0.013 of a second.
Great news. I’d probably considering editing “Serge’s” post above there. He’s here for the link popularity you were mentioning in your post
I’m checking out this new engine now. Hopefully they’ll bring some traffic.
Bloglines is relatively splog free, though not completely. Using a “two or more subscribers” filter should work pretty well. For now.
No search engine left behind! What’s up with Microsoft? Will we see Windows Live Blog Search?
Otis,
That’s about all we say publicly on ExpertRank (formerly known as Teoma), but here is a link to some good (somewhat more technical) background information published outside of Ask.com.
http://www.sear...istillation.pdf
Doug Leeds and Robyn DeuPree on Ask.com Blog and Feed Search
“Chris talks with both Robyn DeuPree, Bloglines Senior Product Manager, and Doug Leeds, Ask.com VP of Product Management, about the new search, how it works and what makes it different from anything else out there.”
http://www.thec...ed_search.phtml
I wonder if Bloglines analyzes the inbound/outbound links based on group or type. For example, if Mike Arrington wrote a political blog (Arrington – Do NOT do this,
), and lots of political blogs linked back to that particular article, TechCrunch would get higher authority.
In order to group a blog, I suppose it would use average content over a certain period of time. If a blog has lots of “web 2.0″ and “entrepreneur” tags, then it must have higher authority in business and technology. If a blog has lots of “global warming”, “democrat”, and “republican” tags, then it must be more political. Theoretically, a blog could morph over time, which seems more than reasonable since that’s how it [i]typically[/i] is.
One question, where do I submit ??
This is much more improved than any other blog search. Keep up the good work!
Bloglines is my reader of (online) choice. I have used the search functionality, and I like the + next to each result. Also I like bloglines because the online response time is by far faster than any other i jave tried.
Will we see Windows Live Blog Search?
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