Hey, Ask Jeeves Did Buy Bloglines

I heard the rumor and thought, hmm, okay. Might be interesting if it's true. Ask Jeeves to buy Bloglines. Don't have a very long-lived blog, I can't recall that they've provided any kind of RSS tools, but all right.

Yes, they did buy Bloglines, as Ask Jeeves notes as their blog ( http://blog.ask.com/2005/02/welcome_bloglin.html ) and Bloglines notes on their site ( http://www.bloglines.com/about/pr_02082005 ). They're not disclosing financial terms.

Random thoughts: So of the major search engines -- Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Google, Gigablast, MSN, and Looksmart(?) -- the two that aren't doing anything with RSS that I can see are Google and Looksmart. Eeesh. (I know Blogger offers syndication feeds, but that's not the search engine. And I know that there are 3rd party ways to get Google RSS feeds, but they're third party.) Of course we'll have to wait and see how much Ask Jeeves integrates Bloglines into its own service.

The other interesting thing about this is that Bloglines itself has been the subject of some controversy lately. The Trademark Blog had some complaints about how their RSS feed was being used by Bloglines ( http://trademark.blog.us/blog/2005/01/20.html ), while there's a nice overview of the whole thing at http://www.makeyougohmm.com/pivotblg/entry.php?id=1351 .

I went to Bloglines and poked around and can't find the advertising that Mr. Schwimmer was concerned about, though I did note that while his blog was marked "That Blog Does Not Exist" on the preview, you are still able to subscribe to it on the Bloglines service. Okay. (My opinion? I can't see the concern on Bloglines but it doesn't matter. It's Mr. Schwimmer's intellectual property. He has the right to control his intellectual property no matter what form it's in. The end.)

It's probably not meaningful at all, but I thought the parallels were interesting. Ask Jeeves has had its own share of intellectual property controversy, from the whole Jeeves thing ( http://www.theregister.com/2000/02/07/wooster_sues_jeeves/ ). And remember those horrible frames that Ask Jeeves used to have on their search results? Ugh. And the advertising. I have occasionally dinged Ask Jeeves about how they've presented ads in their search results. And while they're much better, that gray-on-white font for "Sponsored Content" is a bit much, and why put the sponsored results in a big pile over the search results, instead of to the side? Yuck.

Whoops, this wasn't meant to be an ad slam fest. An Internet company has to make money to stay in business -- this isn't 1998.

Ask Jeeves has acquired several companies in the past -- probably the highest-profile acquisition was search engine Teoma ( http://www.teoma.com ). And Teoma's not a bad search engine, though I don't hear from them as much as I used to. It'll be interesting to see how Ask Jeeves integrates Bloglines into its own content.

Put one more piece of evidence on the pile -- the search engine wars are back.

Update -- Follow the purchase buzz via PubSub: http://atom.pubsub.com/3a/32/3b8ddd8b9ea69d4b289dfdcb82.xml . Does PubSub remind anyone else of Warcraft? "PubSub! Dabu! We're under attttaaaackkk!"

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