Ask.com and Bloglines have delivered a blog search tool that demonstrates some real synergy between the two divisions of the same company.
Back during Web Boom 1.0, I coined a term. “Dyssynergy” is a corporate combination that results in a net destruction of value. Back in the good old days, Lycos was a poster child for the ravages of dyssynergy. The bigger they grew, the lamer they became. We haven’t seen a lot of dyssynergies in the new boom. That’s one thing that distiguishes it from the last one.
But we haven’t see a lot of synergy yet, either.
Ask.com’s new Blogs & Feeds search, which uses information from its Bloglines Web-based feedreader, does a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. And the blogosphere is nothing if not a generous source of chaff.
Previous blog-ranking tools have focused on links as a way to determine a blog’s authority, but Bloglines has a great deal of information about what real people are reading. By harnessing that information, Ask.com has been able to get some great information on authority and provide search results that are useful and interesting.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.