AskJeeves Steps Into RSS with Bloglines Acquisiton

Sugarpimp writes "According to several sources, AskJeeves has stepped into the deep end of the blogging pool with an interesting acquisition. Bloglines is one of the premier RSS readers. Perhaps AskJeeves will be able to legitimize itself again in the crowded search market by integrating Bloglines into its suite of products."

Comments

bloglines news

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Bloglines Member:

Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines, and we're excited about becoming the newest member of their portfolio of web services. We view this as a huge step forward for Bloglines, and a chance to achieve our mission of making RSS news reading and blogging a part of everyone's internet experience. You can learn more about the transaction by reading our press release or reviewing our Frequently Asked Questions.

We want to assure you that the Bloglines service will continue to grow and thrive. Like other companies in the Ask Jeeves portfolio, we will operate as a standalone, separate service -- the Bloglines name will remain, as will our URL, www.bloglines.com. We will support our current features and services, so please continue to log in to Bloglines to search, subscribe, publish and share RSS news feeds and blogs. All users will continue to be governed by the Terms of Service you agreed to when you registered for Bloglines.

We have a great roadmap on how to integrate some of the many innovative technologies of Ask Jeeves, including its Teoma algorithmic search technology. As always, we will share news of our progress on our blog, Bloglines News. And we encourage you to participate in the conversation. Our users have been amazing help in guiding the evolution of Bloglines, and we hope you will continue to give us input so we can remain the gold standard in blogging, search, and news aggregation.

We understand you may have questions about the acquisition and we'll try to answer them all as best we can. Please continue to contact our customer service with your questions and comments.

Thanks for your loyalty, patience, encouragement and feedback throughout this exciting process.

All the best,

Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines Team

Right...

[eddeye]

Perhaps AskJeeves will be able to legitimize itself again in the crowded search market by integrating Bloglines into its suite of products."

Because nothing says "legitimate" like blog.

Confirmed

[shodZ]

Heres the official confirmtation

I wish a search engine would read my mind...

[ABeowulfCluster]

as in knowing my preferences... ie.. remember that I prefer NO BLOGS when I search for news.

Re:I wish a search engine would read my mind...

[jacen_sunstrider]

Uh...bloglines if just the title. If you RTFA at all, you know that BlogLines is simply (though quite handily) a service for reading your daily RSS feeds. I mean, really, who's gonna use it to publish anything? Or search? I go through dozens of headlines a day with this service. Don't knock it just because they originally bought the domain with weblogs as their primary function. Give them credit for moving so well into this rocking new age of informational RSS feeds.

Re:I wish a search engine would read my mind...

[JanneM]

On the contrary, I really do want blogs to be included.

It means someone else has already thought about whatever I'm searching for and taken some time and effort to collect links and write it up. The blogs that get ranked highly for a search are much linked to, and relevant to the search, which will tend to mean the writeup is not bad. If I search for a technical subject, more often than not the blogs I find will end up being written by the very people who create or work with the technology in question. I tend to find much better answers there than in general informational sites.

Same thing goes for getting hits from mailing list archives, by the way.

Re:I wish a search engine would read my mind...

[16K Ram Pack]

I can't believe how many people are banging on about blogging, like it's something completely amazing and new.

8 years ago, there were millions of personal web sites, full of people's top 10 trek episodes. Now, I see an entry on somewhere like Boing Boing or Slashdot, and within 2 hours, it's on someone else's blog. No comment about it, no enhancement, just copy it. I think most blogging will be dead in a year or 2.

If you are going to blog, try and follow the golden rule - make some content, or express an opinion that someone might want to read.

AskJeeves

[mikeophile]

Jeeves, what will happen when askjeeves goes out of business? link

Answer:

It Will Never Happen to Me
By Claudia Black. Only $6.29.
Amazon.com

Re:AskJeeves

[commodoresloat]

Jeeves, what is next when jeeves fades into well deserved obscurity? Link

Answer:

Elitism for the Masses

I tried ask jeeves once...

[jihadi_fungus]

I was having a bad day with google, and I was getting really frustrated. I submitted:

"How the fuck can I get /boot to mount by default on gentoo?"

It came back with a bunch of pr0n because of the F word...mount probably didn't help either :|

Re:I tried ask jeeves once...

[Gudlyf]

""How the fuck can I get /boot to mount by default on gentoo?"

It came back with a bunch of pr0n because of the F word...mount probably didn't help either :|"

Boatloads of shoe fettish pr0n I would guess...

Question.

[FireballX301]

How is acquiring a blog service in any way 'redeem' a search service? I don't use google because it has Picasa or Groups or anything. I use google because it has a no-frills, high quality search engine with a clean interface and relatively unobtrusive ads. I don't see AskJeeve's search engine as being anywhere near as good.

So in essence, was getting the blog service good for the company? Sure. Was it good for the reputation of the engine? Hell no.

Ask Who?

[nate nice]

Remeber when they had the highest IPO ever! It skyrocketed from like $5.00 to $130 in one day! Holy shit it must have been exciting working there at first assuming they gave away stock like everyone else. Anyone know what's it at now days? My guess is about $3.50. Maybe $5.00 but it cannot be anymore than that.

Man, I totaly forgot that place existed. Does anyone actually use it?

I talked to Bloglines and Ask Jeeves about it

[Marc Hedlund]

And it's definitely true. I wrote up my conversation on the O'Reilly Network.

In short, I think it's a good deal for Ask Jeeves. They're trying to compete with Google and Yahoo, and to do that they need to do something new. The user profiles Bloglines has would make a great tool for pricing Google AdWord-style text ads -- but the "oo" companies (G*gle and Yah*) don't have the same incentive to try something radically different. They're sticking with what works. Maybe by offering a richer profile to ad buyers, Ask Jeeves will be able to break into the search market more aggressively.

More in the full blog post.

it's confirmed news

[mallumax]

Bloglines have confirmed it.
Announcement page
Press release
FAQ about acquisition

My personal motto:

[mboverload]

"If it's not on Google, it doesn't exist"

Re:Err

[britneys 9th husband]

Not only are they still around, but their market cap is one point four two billion dollars. That's over twice the market value of Netflix.

It's also over 10 times as much market value as VA Software. Which do you think is more likely to still be around in, say, 2015 -- Slashdot, or Ask Jeeves?

Too bad short selling is so risky...

Intrigues

[Sundroid]

Ambitious man, that Jeeves. According to a CNET report, About.com is now up for sale, and Ask Jeeves is one of the bidders. The intriguing element here is that Google is also one of the bidders, of About.com, that is. Here is the link to the article: http://news.com.com/Primedia%20puts%20About.com%20 up%20for%20sale/2100-1025_3-5566950.html?tag=nefd. top

Ask Jeeves' Blog Post

[wdr1]

http://blog.ask.com/2005/02/welcome_bloglin.html

Bah! The bloggers

[Yuruusan]

Man, I had no idea Ask Jeeves was still around. It sucked way back, and probably will contintue to suck, and purchasing blogglines in no way of redeeming itself. I might be only one person with an oppinion, but when I read news, I want it to be just that, news not another worthless oppinion from another crazy dolt out there. If I want to hear someone ranting about the current headlines I go talk to a drunk. Not trying to troll here, I just see bloggers as a completely wortholess humans.

Information OD?

[womanfiend]

I run about ten RSS feeds on my Firefox browser that run the day's headlines and whatnot from leading news outlets and niche content providers of interest to me.

I've tried some Blog RSS feeds, along with some other very-high-output feeds, and it strikes me as too damned much. RSS is great for something like Slashdot or The New York Times where there's an editor on the other end to hold back the content delivered to a sane amount, but the architecture (as in "really simply") of RSS, while certainly sufficently robust, just isn't well designed for a high volume of hits per feed. I feel like I've immediately OD'ed, badly, on information when I pull down the home feed for PRWeb.

The solution? I shitcanned the PRWeb feed, even though I spend a lot of time on their website. And that's the fix, right there. Continuing upon the example, PRWeb's homepage is much better suited to sifting through the zillions of things they update all of the time than an RSS feed. Might the same apply to bloglines?

Re:Step One

[Frymaster]

Perhaps, this is step one in updating it's services. It's not nearly as effective as the other search engines.

1. buy bloglines
2. ???
3. profit!

i've got a question for jeeves: how the hell are you going to make money with this?

just askin'.

Re:Step One

[maethlin]

Smells like FUD to me. A lot of people posting about how horrid Jeeves is, yet nobody yet stating why? Have you actually compared query results? These days I've found Jeeves results to be around equivalent to Google, and quite often more relevant since it is much less a target to spammers.

Compare this to Yahoo and MSN results... (bad and abysmal, respectively) This leaves me using both Jeeves and Google about equally, but more and more I use Jeeves due to better results. If you want search only without any of the extra "smart answers" - you could also just use their backend via teoma.com.

If you really wanna trash Jeeves, at least give us a real basis to do so. Me personally, I greatly dislike the Jeeves frame that stays up by default when you search (though this is easily turned off anyways, permanently if you wish).

Re:Rant

[Scarblac]

Boot doesn't really have to be its own partition. However, it is much safer to have it on its own partition, and not mounted in normal situations. That way you can never accidentally mess up something there and make your machine unbootable. It's a safety precaution.

in other words

[commodoresloat]

Bloglines Confirms: AskJeeves is dead.

still disappointing, but the other way around

[imr]

I just tried your search in order to look what kind of porn it would bring, and it gave me only linux and gentoo related sites.
Either they upgraded their search engine or they read slashdot.