I’ve been a closet fan of ASK for some time now. I’ve thought, like many, that they could. And since the purchase of Bloglines over a year ago, I’ve been waiting for them along with everyone else to bring out a robust, useful blog search.
It’s here, and it’s awesome! blogsearch.ask.com
Thank God They Get It
What worries me about these things (Search releases in general) is the lock in factor. I’m pleased to say that whilst promoting themselves, ASK have done a fine job of realizing that not everyone uses Bloglines, and that we all have our own preferences. You can see just from doing a simple search that there are very neat pulldowns to get the feeds of the individual results in handy subscribe buttons to major services, and lucky for me, to the raw feed.
You can also Digg it, Del.icio.us it and more. Game on!
No Crawler = Less Spam, Hooray!
Blogines founder Mark Fletcher says they’re indexing over 1.5billion archived posts, and the fact that they are searching what people subscribe to means that with a bit of luck, the results will be less prone to being full of shit, a la Technorati and pretty much every other blog/feed search already out there.
Chris Sherman, who wrote a great writeup for SearchDay tells us:
Since blogging and feeds tend to be more associated with individuals rather than organizations, Ask has also implemented a sophisticated name-recognition capability. Search for a name, and for active bloggers you see links to posts by and posts about the person. Another feature surfaces “top feeds” based on a combination of relevance to your query and popularity of blogs that match your query.
which is cool, though i’ve yet to find a way track links to posts, though to be fair, i was so excited when I saw this this morning that I really didn’t explore everything before posting. If you work it out, let me know….
Looking around at the various posts on this, it’s getting a pretty good play in the ‘sphere, and for my part, i LOVE it!
Let us know what you think.
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7 thoughts on “ASK’s New Blog Search ROCKS”
You can’t search for kanji (at least from Opera 8.5 Windows) – it returns no hits for anything I might throw at it, although it does display correctly.
Oh, and it lists my dead-and-deactivated-for-six-months feed above my fresh updated every day feed in the “Related” column for a few searches.
Thanks!
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http://performancing.com/ask
Thanks for the heads-up. I’m really impressed by this search. It got my feed right and I found a couple of posts that referred to my site. Awesome – I’ve Blinked it.
Man! I think this is one of the best new introductions on the web. Of course, the vanity searches have to come first, and here’s what I like (LOVE???) about the new blogsearch (sorry for any repetition):
– The binoculars which let me “preview” a site – DAMN clever (and time-saving)
– The suggested feeds at the top – It got mine right. Not sure about anybody elses
– The “subscribing” drop-down… FINALLY somebody let’s me subscribe easily to my Google Reader. (Or, at the very least, let’s my simple-minded self do it easily)
A good reminder to add some of my feeds to my blogline account.
I must say the little pootle I just had with it confirms what your initial impressions were Nick, it does indeed seem to rock. Of course my first couple of searches were vanity searches, but it did return first result as one of my posts and second someone mentioning me. Searches for my blog name also turned up useful results. I think it is strange it returns results from non-blogs though, sometimes its cool (like returning flickr group discussions) but doesn’t seem a “blog” result to me?
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