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Oakland, California-based Internet search and media firm Ask.com has introduced a news searching Web site  called BigNews that incorporates video, image, blog content and popularity rankings from community news site Digg with geo-targeted tracking features, the company announced Wednesday. The service was built to give site visitors a new and more complete way to view news, and has been added as one the five major sections on Ask.com's main Web site. News Popularity Firm Digg Joins New Ask.com Venture BigNews was created using a new variation of Ask.com's search algorithm to make finding and tracking  important and popular news stories and associated multimedia content easier. The service's help section described BigNews as providing "a multi-layer perspective of the news through our unique presentation of our search results," a method of ranking news stories based on a so-called BigFactor - an algorithm based on four main factors. Each news story on the new service shows how each of these factors ranks on a chart that appears when users hover the mouse pointer over a special area to the right of a story, displaying how the story ranks on a scale from 0 to 100. The service, which is able to track news stories over time, displays overviews of the major news stories at the top of the site and ten news items submitted to the Digg site below, including five that BigNews has found to be  both popular and relevant, as well as five stories that haven't yet been recommended, a unique addition which could give visitors the chance to find newly-submitted news. The main news items on BigNews have been chosen using what Ask.com calls a BigFactor, which calculates how new a piece of news is, how it has affected the Web, how many news-related images and videos are linked to it, and how much discussion it has received on blog sites. In addition to using this method to sort such top-level categories as major stories, business, entertainment, sports, and others, BigNews also takes into consideration the authority and expertise of the news item's creator and source as well as how the news is referenced on social media Web sites. BigNews users can refine their searches using pre-defined categories or through a news source filter that can exclude news from selected media outlets, or show only new stories from a list of favorite news sources. Ability to Track News By World Regions Ask.com noted that it monitored over 10,000 news sources for the new service, including such international sources as AllAfrica.com, South Africa's Daily News, the China Daily, Germany's Deutsche Welle, Argentina's Buenos Aires Herald, Bahrain's Gulf Daily News, and the Sydney Morning Herald, in order to give BigNews users what the service's help section calls "a more complete picture of what's going on in the world." Follow Stories For Up To One Month The top news items on the new Ask.com service have a separate custom overview page available. Called the BigPicture page, this section displays more elements than news items on the main page of the site, including in some cases a history feature for tracing a story over the past 30 days. Aimed squarely at those looking to follow current news stories, BigNews noted that it is not intended as an archival news service. BigNews has entered the fray and will compete with other news aggregator services such as Google News operated by the Internet search leader, Yahoo's Yahoo News, and WebmasterWorld's NewsRaid. Ask.com Introduces News Aggregator BigNews BigNews incorporates links to popularly-ranked news stories from Digg throughout the site, sorted by popularity, however it does not offer visitors its own system to directly vote on favorite news stories. Ask.com's new service can be used with most popular news feed readers, or users can choose to customize their own "MyNews" area on the BigNews site. The help section of the BigNews site indicated that Ask.com plans to add more personalization features in future updates to the service. Related Links:
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10:39 pm on Feb. 7, 2008 (utc 0)