Ask Jeeves to Acquire Bloglines
Ask Jeeves to Acquire Bloglines (BetaNews)
As was widely rumored in the 24 hours preceeding the announcement, Ask Jeeves announced that it will acquire Trustic, the company that owns and operates Bloglines. As part of the deal, Bloglines will still remain a separate Web entity. However, Ask Jeeves users will see greater integration with the service across the rest of the search engine’s properties. “Bloglines is not only a market leader in feed aggregation and blog search, but it is truly one of the most useful and addictive services on the entire Web. We are excited about providing Bloglines with the resources to grow its service and help it reach a broader audience,” said Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves’ senior vice president of search properties.
Bloglines uses RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, which is a technology used to make content on Web logs, or blogs, available for a multitude of uses. Bloglines has quickly become one of the more frequently used blog syndication sites due to it’s capabilities of being able to index not only articles, but also images, audio, and video from blogs.
Lanzone says Bloglines will make Ask Jeeves one of the most comprehensive search engines on the web. “It is exciting to have the opportunity to connect Bloglines’ live information flow and blog search capabilities with our unique indexing technology to provide consumers with one of the most comprehensive and personal web experiences across all sources — from the desktop to the Internet and, now, into the blogosphere,” said Lanzone.
Interesting. I’ve never used Bloglines, although I seem to be one of the last holdouts on RSS. Clearly, Ask Jeeves thinks indexing blogs is going to somehow catapult it into a major player in the increasingly crowded search engine wars.
Ask Jeeves joins web log market (BBC)
Ask Jeeves has bought the Bloglines website to improve the way it handles content from web journals or blogs. The Bloglines site has become hugely popular as it gives users one place in which to read, search and share all the blogs they are interested in. Ask Jeeves said it was not planning to change Bloglines but would use the 300 million articles it has archived to round out its index of the web.
Bloglines has become popular because it lets users build a list of the blogs they want to follow without having to visit each journal site individually. To do this it makes use of a technology known as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) that many blogs have adopted to let other sites know when new entries are made on their journals.
The acquisition follows similar moves by other search sites. Google acquired Pyra Labs, makers of the Blogger software, in 2003. In 2004 MSN introduced its own blog system and Yahoo has tweaked its technology to do a better job of handling blog entries. Jim Lanzone, vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves in the US, said it did not acquire Bloglines just to get a foothold in the blog publishing world. He said Ask Jeeves was much more interested in helping people find information they were looking for rather than helping them write it. “The universe of readers is vastly larger than the universe of writers,” he said.
I’d like to note the only reason I first started reading you is that bloglines recommended you based on the other blogs in my feed.
i never use bloglines either put they send me lots of traffic. Though the way things go, I won’t be shocked if that stops now that they have been bought. Did I mispell anthiog?