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Posts with tag BlogSearch

Ask.com adds official blog feeds to web results

Ask.com adds blog feeds to web resultsAsk.com has started including official blog feeds in their search results when you search for popular brands or web site names. The feed listing displays the last three or four posts on the website's official blog at the top of the results page, along with a link to the blog itself. The feed even appears above the sponsored listings.

When you search Download Squad, for example, you'll see our last three blog posts on the search page. Likewise a search for 37signals turned up a feed for their Signal Vs Noise blog, and searches for del.icio.us and reddit turned up their official company blogs. A search for digg, however, returned only popular front page links and no mention of Digg the Blog.

The one blog I was disappointed not to be able to find was the Ask.com Blog itself. The post detailing the flatline in office productivity when a particular Google product failed is enough on its own to warrant more prominent placement on the Ask.com network.

All and all I like this feature. Ask.com has been trying to push the innovation envelope for two years now and they have created a long series of Class A products along the way. Ask.com's blog search functionality is easily the best and most complete of all the major offerings, and it is great to see this feature find its way into other areas of the Ask.com website.

Greaseonkey script adds a pseudo-search box to Google Reader

Greaseonkey script adds a pseudo-search box to Google Reader

Continuing the buzz surrounding the new Google Reader, 3rd party Greasemonkey scripts are cropping up that either modify or add much-requested features (like integrating it with Gmail). At the top of this request list (or at least near it) is search - after all, it is a Google product. Unfortunately, the Reader team's own Mihai Parparita has explained in the product's Google Group that search is a bit tricky right now - but they're working on it.

While you wait though, why not add at least some basic search functionality with this Greasemonkey script? Be warned though, as by 'basic' I mean 'it can only search a single feed you're reading, or all blogs across the blogosphere, via Google's Blog Search.' For now, it can't search multiple blogs (a limit of the Blog Search engine itself) or folders of feeds in Reader, but hey - it's a start. On the plus side, the author is open to suggestions if anyone knows of an engine better suited to the task of searching multiple sites at once, so throw your two cents in if you want to make the only Google Reader search that much better.

Blogs missing from Yahoo! News search results

Yahoo! NewsIt was almost a year ago when Yahoo! began including blogs as a subset of it's Y! News search results pages. Tonight I have notice that they are missing. There was a struggle as whether to include them within the News Search results or segregate them as was finally decided. I wonder if the battle with this decision is continuing.

No clues anywhere about not including them in search results anymore. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?


Updated 8/27/06 - I received information that this move was the result of the rampant splog problem and only a trickle of click-through traffic. Thus the overhead to operate it wasn't justified.

Second update 8/27/06: Greg Jarboe blogs: Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesperson, called me back to say the Blogs beta had been "temporarily taken offline to retool the offering."

So it depends on whether you believe internal communications or the PR group.

Bloglines and Ask.com launch blog search engine

Bloglines/Ask.com blog search

Bloglines, the immensely popular web-based feed reader owned by Ask.com, launched its long-awaited blog search engine yesterday. The search can be accessed from both the Bloglines and Ask.com web sites, with slightly different interfaces. Bloglines' search adds a "+" button next to each search result that lets you preview posts in their entirety and a "more info" link that shows a cute pop-up with the feed's number of Bloglines subscribers and any citations for the post. Both search pages have a few advanced options, including filtering by date, sorting by date, relevance, or popularity, and including or excluding news. It also has the obvious (but welcome) integration with Bloglines, allowing you to subscribe to feeds (the Ask.com version also lets you subscribe with Google Reader, NewsGator, or My Yahoo!), "clip" posts, and post them to del.icio.us, Digg, or Newsvine. Not bad.

[Thanks, Andreas!]

Sphere blog search with data

sphere blog searchSphere is yet another blog search engine. Of course, there's a twist. Sphere can show a bit more data surrounding a search, and allows you to better refine your search results. This sounds like iterative improvements, but in fact, this is all handled quite nicely within their system. I had mixed results, to be honest. And I couldn't seem to find all the cool data reportage some have shown, but I like the "related media" search aspect. It'll show you podcasts, images, books (via Amazon), and news (via CNN) based on your search. Even better is a bookmarklet from Sphere that'll let you pretty much take any web page, and perform a real-time analysis of links (not content, which is iffy anyway), with blog search results for your review. As always, TechCrunch has more details, and even an audio interview with Sphere's CEO Tony Conrad and advisor Toni Schneider.

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