Ask Jeeves and Bloglines : SearchViews Interview of Mark Fletcher
SearchViews has a nice 5 question interview with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines. If you happen to live on another planet and don’t follow search or blog oriented news much, Bloglines is a blog feed aggregator, subscription service, and blog news search service purchased at the beginning of the year by Ask Jeeves. The Ask Jeeves acquisition of Bloglines may be the first of multiple search acquisitions of blog monitoring services in 2005. Some of the most recent acquisitions were of Flickr this spring and Blo.gs by Yahoo last month.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview : You recently said your firm will be releasing a “world class” blog search engine that will blow the others out of the water. When’s that going to happen? What’s going to make it different than what’s currently available?
Mark Fletcher : Well that’s a bit of an exaggeration – I said that world-class blog search doesn’t exist today, and we are working to bring that to market. Blog search is a difficult technical challenge and I’m not going to take anything away from the people who are out there trying to tackle the problem. Bloglines has had blog search capabilities from day one and we know first hand that it’s a complicated puzzle. But I think all of us can do better, and I believe Bloglines has the elements to get it right.
There are 3 key components required to deliver world-class blog search: a deep index of blog and news feed content, the capability to find and index new content quickly, and world-class search technology that brings relevant search results to users. Bloglines is the only service that has all three elements. We have the largest documented index of blog and feed articles (well over a half billion articles). We also index more new blog and feed content than anybody else (2-3 million new articles every day). And as part of Ask Jeeves, Bloglines has access to world-class search technologies. Bring those all together, and we’ll elevate the blog search game to a new level.
