Ask.com and Bloglines are upping the ante on blog search with their newly revamped Blog & Feed Search launching on May 31, 2006. While we’ve seen plenty of blog and feed search solutions like Technorati, Ice Rocket, Google’s Blog Search, etc, they all suffer from a similar problem: blog spam. If you search on any topic, there’s invariably more junk than real content because it’s simply too easy to game the system at this point. Ask is taking a different approach by using a vetted collection of feeds to build their result set: Bloglines subscriptions. To appear in the results, at least one Bloglines subscriber needs to be subscribed to a feed. From there, the Ask search algorithm takes over to deliver results based on authority, which theoretically pushes spam blogs to the bottom of the heap. In addition to adding a new mechanism for calculating blog search results, Ask has added several features, like the binoculars found in standard Ask results and an option to subscribe to both feeds and results sets in a number of popular feed readers. Chris talks with both Robyn DeuPree, Bloglines Senior Product Manager, and Doug Leeds, Ask.com VP of Product Management, about the new search, how it works and what makes it different from anything else out there.