Ask BigNews
Encyclopedia
Ask BigNews is an automated internet-based news aggregator and search engine
provided by Ask.com
on February 6th, 2008. News are retrieved from more than 10.000 sources and automatically grouped into stories; for each story a BigPicture page is produced, offering an overall view of all pertaining elements (news articles, blog posts, images, videos and digg
s), following an integrated approach similar to the one adopted since June 2007 by Ask's web search.
The system recognizes and keeps track of the evolution of each story, allowing users to "go back in time" (up to 30 days in the past) or track it in order to follow its further progress.
Stories are ranked by means of an index called BigFactor; although the details of BigFactor's computation aren't known, Ask.com declares it estimates a story's importance taking into account four parameters: breaking (the story's freshness), impact (how frequently the story is being referred to by other articles and blogs), media (the number and quality of multimedia contents related to the story) and discussion (how much attention the story gained from the public).
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
provided by Ask.com
Ask.com
Ask is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...
on February 6th, 2008. News are retrieved from more than 10.000 sources and automatically grouped into stories; for each story a BigPicture page is produced, offering an overall view of all pertaining elements (news articles, blog posts, images, videos and digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
s), following an integrated approach similar to the one adopted since June 2007 by Ask's web search.
The system recognizes and keeps track of the evolution of each story, allowing users to "go back in time" (up to 30 days in the past) or track it in order to follow its further progress.
Stories are ranked by means of an index called BigFactor; although the details of BigFactor's computation aren't known, Ask.com declares it estimates a story's importance taking into account four parameters: breaking (the story's freshness), impact (how frequently the story is being referred to by other articles and blogs), media (the number and quality of multimedia contents related to the story) and discussion (how much attention the story gained from the public).