News

Ask Integrating Smart Answers Into Search Results

Ask has announced in their blog that they’ve started integrating the contents of RSS feeds into their Smart Answers service. Their Smart Answers, you may remember, are the answers that appear at the top of a search results page before the actual Web search results.

Now, if you search for a certain blogs, you’ll get the last three RSS feed entries from that blog at the top of the search results list (it looks like the content is snippets only; you’re not going to get entire entries.) So if you do a search for ResearchBuzz, you’ll get the last three entries from ResearchBuzz along with an icon so you can tell you’re viewing RSS content.

Ask.com promises more feeds to be added over time to Smart Answers — at the moment it’s somewhat limited. In a meantime, here’s a quick suggestion: while you’re showing that RSS icon on the results page, how about having it link to the RSS feed from which you’re pulling the recent entries? If I stumble across one of these RSSified Smart Answers and I really like what I see, how about making it super easy for me to subscribe to the entire RSS feed myself?

Categories: News