Search Engine Company Ask Jeeves has bought the popular RSS aggregator Bloglines. According to their acquisition faq, this is so that Ask Jeeves can incorporate the indexed RSS feeds into their search results. The bloglines services will apparently remain free.
The related press release contains some boring facts, quotes, and a huge disclaimer about the ‘forward-looking statements’ contained within.
Andy said:
I’m taking this as bad news. Ask Jeeves is a horrible search engine which plasters it’s site and results with adverts and popups, masks the URL of websites it returns and promotes the myth that the internet will understand you if you ask vague question in natural english.
Bloglines, on the otherhand is an excellent service and the principle of shared online RSS polling makes good sense as well as the ability to search all subscribed blogs. So maybe nothing will change in the immediate future but I’ll be keeping an eye out for alternatives from now on.