Ask.com Adds RSS Smart Answers
Ask.com has put together which may be one of their most useful and, well, smartest Smart Answers offerings to date; RSS Smart Answers. Currently when searching for specific blogs on Ask.com (try TechCrunch), the three latest RSS feeds from that site are served at the very top of the Ask.com search results.
Sure, this is useful for those people who are searching for specific blogs by name, but RSS is much more than blogging and I’d expect to see some other RSS Smart Answers offerings from Ask.com such as clustered feed results from various sources for specific themed searches, sports scores and highlights, and possibly even something similar to what Google Finance is doing – monitoring blog and feed conversations for up to the minute information.
Let’s also not forget that RSS goes beyond the written word with audio podcasting, image sharing and online video which can be worked in to similar Answers.
Gary Price and Ryan Massie of Ask.com add on the Ask.com Blog (which features some nice examples):
Stand by, because many more RSS Smart Answers are on the way. The initial list was selected based on the most popular feeds chosen by our users in Bloglines. Over time we’ll be adding a more comprehensive list – the possibilities for RSS Smart Answers are endless and go way beyond news and blog feeds.
