WSJ writes:
Blog search engines have existed for years as a way to conduct keyword searches among the vast array of content from professionals, pundits and couch potatoes. A blog search is ideal for searching product reviews, the fallout from news events and celebrity gossip because it can take the pulse of what people are talking about during a small window of time. A search on Ask.com’s standard Web search engine for Palm’s Treo 600, for instance, pulls up links to the official Palm Treo site and those of other merchants. But in Ask.com’s new blog search, most of the top results are reviews and help pages featuring advice such as where to buy batteries for the device.
Ask.com uses its search technology and the popularity of feeds in Bloglines to help rank the results, which users can filter by posts, feeds and news and sort by relevance, most recent and popularity. The site also lets searchers easily subscribe to the feeds and blogs featured in the results in Bloglines and other feed readers offered by companies like Yahoo and Google through drop-down menus.
