Ask.com has launched a new web log and web feed search engine.

This one is a bit different from the regular blog search engines out there. It does not spider web log pages or RSS feeds to generate and index based on their content. Instead it makes use of Ask’s Bloglines tool.

Bloglines lets users gather information from their favorite blogs and RSS feeds, and gathers the headlines on a separate web page. This news aggregator also lets you save “clippings” for later viewing. Through this feature, users are actually tagging articles they find interesting.

Ask uses this information in order to identify the best and most relevant weblog news items and articles.

This is also an efficient way of dealing with blog spam, which has become a serious problem lately (people setting up automatically generated blog to capture text ad revenue).

Like the Google blog search tool, Ask sorts results in order of relevance, not date, although you may ask it to sort by date. We would probably have done it the other way round.

You may also sort according to popularity, and distinguish between posts (i.e. individual blog stories), feeds (taken from RSS files and the like) and news (taken from news services like Moreover).

Ask has added a preview feature that lets you take a look at the feed before you go to the relevant web page.

There is also a pull down menu that lets you subscribe to the relevant feed using Bloglines and other major online news aggregators, and another menu that can be used to post information regarding the story to services like Bloglines, del.icio.us and digg.

Ask’s blog search engine will cover some 4 to 6 million new blog posts daily, with a total index of about 1.5 billion articles.

See also Search Engine Watch: Ask Debuts Blog & Feed Search