Thursday, June 1, 2006

New Ask Blog Search

The new Ask blog search has launched, Gary tells me, and it’s also rolled out for Bloglines (disclosure: an Ask ad campaign is in the talks for this blog for some time now, I dunno yet if it’ll come). It looks interesting and obviously tries to mine whatever RSS and other data it can find; for example, for this blog you’ll see the favicon, and you see who wrote what in the forum. Unfortunately, with many of Ask’s services (including this one) I’m always forwarded to the German version... even after clicking on “US” and re-visiting. I think it’s a bug, not a feature, especially considering Ask ignores my browser language settings.

Now there are a lot of features I’ll probably never need which slightly clutter every single result snippet (a binocular, save button, subscribe and post-to buttons). What really matters in blog search is easy backlinks searching – searching for the Google Blogoscoped URL returns results from Google Blogoscoped too, which isn’t very good – as well as indexing depth/ speed and results relevancy. It’s hard to test indexing depth, but a quick comparison with Google Blog Search and Technorati shows Ask can hold up. Sometimes, Ask finds more, sometimes Technorati, and sometimes Google. In a search for “the” however Google claims over twice as many results as Ask.

New Ask Blog Search by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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