Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines

One thing to note, Ask Jeeves, or any other search company, could built a system like this very quickly. What they would have trouble doing is getting all the data, going back more than say, a month, structured, organized and pulled. That's because blog posts fall off the front pages (depending on frequency of blogging and how many posts the blogger displays) and go into archives. If you think about how many kinds of blog software out there, which means many kind of data structures for the blog post data, which then makes it difficult to get all the various types of data structured into a database, just imagine how all the variants of those professionally and homegrown systems differ for archival posts. Lots of people customize their archives, as I have in MT and other blogs I participate in with Wordpress, Typepad, etc. Spidering and structuring archives is really tough, tougher than getting the stuff on the tops of blogs right. The point is, a comprehensive database of blogs structured as well as can be, going back a couple of years, is really valuable. As is the knowledge of how to put that database together, and run it, along with understanding why this kind of search is very different than those done by Google or Ask Jeeves, whose results don't understand the temporal qualities of blog data, or other aspects that make it different.