Ask.com Adds Blog Searching

It's not all Yahoo, Google, and MSN out there: the now butler-free Ask.com has unveiled a special channel devoted to tracking blogs.

In a bid to increase its appeal to the sort of online user who has to have their daily fix of snarkiness, camera photos, and RSS-enabled navel-gazing (and, we’re sure, real citizen journalism as well!), search engine Ask.com has added a specialty channel devoted to blogs.

Ask.com’s blog-searching service builds on technology and information drawn from Bloglines, which Ask.com acquired late in 2005. Traditional search engines have trouble keeping up with sites like blogs which are often updated rapidly with small, link-laden posts; according to Ask.com, the new service indexes more than 1.5 billion blog posts, and the company is enabling users to read blogs using Ask.com’s own reader, or via rival readers from Google, Yahoo, and Newsgator. Users can also post search results to popular sites like Digg, del.ic.io.us, newsvine, and (of course) Bloglines.

An open question is whether search features dedicated to blogs will help the Jeeves-free Ask.com: although the company is trying hard to lure traffic away from the Web’s most popular search destinations (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) Ask.com still ranks at the bottom of search market share surveys, attracting about 6 percent of of online searches.