Online Marketing Blog

The long awaited Ask.com Blog Search Engine has finally launched. There are two iterations: One for Ask.com in the form of another right side option. The other within Bloglines.com. The Ask.com blogs and feeds search is directed more towards general users. The Bloglines versions offers more advanced options for “prosumers” as Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com called them in our preview call.

Key features include the use of Ask.com “expert rank” which breaks the web into communities and defines subject specific link popularity. This is combined with Bloglines.com subscription data to determine relevance in blog and feed search results.

I signed up for a Sphere beta account late last year. I played with it a bit and like many “Web 2.0″ apps, found it interesting, still in development and then I moved on. However, Andy Beal recently made a post about Sphere, so I checked it out again.

Today, Sphere V1.5 has been released and is publicly available. What’s new in this version:

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;

Yesterday at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference I ran into Brian Prince, CEO of Best of the Web (BOTW.org), who clearly have plenty of fans as evident from all the black, long sleeve t-shirts worn by conference attendees. In fact, they ran out the first day of the conference and had to get more.

A few months ago, BOTW.org launched a new blogs directory. Yesterday, they took the next step and added search to the directory. You can search by posts, tags or blogs.