Search engine Ask has launched a news website entitled BigNews in collaboration with community information site Digg.Digg is one of the web's most popular social bookmarking sites, through which users are able to 'digg' stories they like and share them with other users - a feature on which BigNews capitalises.
Ask's site uses technology described as "the BigFactor" to rank stories based on issues such as impact, quantity of multimedia, freshness and amount of related discussion.
The search engine describes the services as a means of helping internet users locate and track the "most important and most talked about stories in the news".
Through the site, users can monitor stories and follow their progression over time, discover the top videos and the most popular people in the news, and get additional background information on searches, among other things.
It provides category clusters and allows users to browse by "top Diggs" and "no Diggs", while also containing a Blogviews area that highlights the latest posts from selected blogs.
According to Ask, BigNews already has nearly 10,000 news sources available to it.
Promoting its new offering, Ask states: "Do you like finding many viewpoints, not just stories from the wire services? Do you like the idea of a mix of results of videos, images, articles and blogs in one neat package? Do you like more effective search tools to find a specific story of interest? Do you like the idea of knowing which stories people are talking around the water cooler?
"If you answered 'yes' to any of these questions, then, we welcome you to Ask BigNews."
A recent post on influential tech blog TechCrunch reported that Digg nearly tripled its user base last year, from just over 750, 000 in December 2006 to 2.7 million in December 2007.
