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Ask.com has launched a news service called ‘Big News‘ that delivers newsworthy content ranked by what they call a ‘BigFactor’. Ranking news content is nothing new, but it does give the service a distinctive difference from the more traditional Yahoo and Google News, by displaying the ranking score for each article.
Like other news aggregators, BigNews pulls stories from websites, blogs, video and more across the web and links to each story with images, text and video. The key difference is the BigFactor, which decides which stories are shown above others on the site. The BigFactor is scored using various factors including how new the story is, how much buzz it’s generating online and how many sites link to the story.
At the bottom of the page, BigNews also shows top ranked stories from Digg.com and links to upcoming digg stories as well.
Overall I really like the interface Ask have provided here, it’s a clean looking website and the ability to see top stories from various categories is great. You can also see a breakdown of how the article ranks by placing your mouse over the BigFactor button.
I haven’t found a way to submit new stories, so business owners wanting their news to be included in the service need to ensure it already has solid exposure on the web. Ask plan to be releasing new features for the service soon so BigNews is definitely something to watch.
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Funny, no one seems to have commented about the ridiculous graphics that headline these “news” pages. Like little pieces of detritus that lay over the BigNews image. It’s a metaphor, I think, for the kind of news that’s presented–it’s not really good unless it’s degraded.
By Anonymous - February 12, 2008