As Vanessa noted, Ask.com has revamped its news aggregation service, adding lots of bells and whistles and a few useful features. Most notably, Ask has embraced the social media tenet that you need others to tell you how important a news story is, with its new "BigFactor" ratings. Like Google News, Yahoo News, and other news aggregators, Big News scans and analyzes traditional news sources, prominent blogs, and video sources, and groups related stories about specific events. Within each story are links to all of the articles, blog posts, images, and videos associated with the event, allowing [...]

Related Topics: Ask: News

Ask has just launched a new search service called BigNews, similar to Google News with a side of Digg. It uses something called "BigFactor" to rank stories (using signals like freshness, impact, quantity of multimedia, and amount of related discussion), provides category clusters, and lets you browse by top Diggs and no Diggs (as Mashable asks, why?). It also contains a "Blogviews" section that seems to simply highlight the latest posts from selected blogs. BigNews is starting with more than 10,000 news sources, but no word on how to get your news site added. The help documentation notes [...]

Related Topics: Ask: News