Ask BigNews is an automated internet-based

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, ...

and

web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

provided by

Ask.com Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design. Wa ...

on February 6, 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, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...

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).

References

American news websites {{news-website-stub

See also

References