New Blog Search Engine from Ask.com

There's a new blog search engine in town from Ask.com. The best thing about it? It's wonderfully intertwined with Ask's (in my opinion) best property, Bloglines. Let me show you what I mean:

I did a simple search for search engine, and the results page was a bit different than other blog search engines. First of all, you can sort by relevance, popularity, or most recent. The default search results come back with blog posts, but you have tabbed options for Feeds and News. You can play with the drop-down menu to manipulate what time frame you'd like your results from as well, and there's also a subscribe button if you'd like to keep track of your search. Oh, and to the right, Ask shows relevant feeds that you might want to check out and subscribe to that are relevant to your search. As Mr. Burns would say, exxcccellent.

But then, even more cool stuff. I've numbered what I want to talk about in the below screenshot:

1. What's with the binoculars? That's Ask.com's nifty preview feature; this allows you to see a small screenshot of that search result before you leave the Ask.com search results. It's a good way to figure out if that search result is something you really want to spend any time on.

2. Save The Save feature allows you to save search results and Web page snippets to your very own My Ask page. This is great for keeping a project organized, by the way.

3. Subscribe If you click on that Subscribe widget, you get the option of instantly subscribing to that search result's feed through Bloglines, Google, Newsgator, or a vanilla RSS feed that you can tweak to whatever news reader you use (and if you don't know what a RSS reader is, read my article The Best RSS Readers on the Web).

4. Post To Another handy-dandy feature. The Post To widget allows you to instantly contribute to social networking sites Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, and your Bloglines Clip Blog, one of the features that I've been meaning to use more over at Bloglines.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with Ask's new blog search engine. I LOVE how it's all mixed up with the best of Bloglines; I think that this absolutely will be one of the most useful blog search engines out there because of this fact alone.