Ask Jeeves snaps up Bloglines

Search site Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines, a service which allows users to search, publish and share blogs and other web content.

Ask Jeeves said that Bloglines will continue to operate as an independent brand and retain its name and web address. The financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

"Bloglines is not only a market leader in feed aggregation and blog search, but is one of the most useful and addictive services on the entire web," said Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves.

"We are excited about providing Bloglines with the resources to grow its service and help it reach a broader audience."

Founded in 2003, Bloglines indexes more than 280 million web content elements such as news feed and blog articles, images, audio and video. It is available in English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

"Bloglines became so popular because it was one of the first web services to make blog and RSS feed reading free and easy to understand for average internet users," said Bloglines chief executive Mark Fletcher. "We want to continue this quest to bring our exciting capabilities into the mainstream."

Ask Jeeves stated that the deal brings together "complementary technology assets", including Bloglines' RSS aggregation capabilities and Ask Jeeves' Teoma algorithmic search technology.

Bloglines' web search capability will now be powered by Ask Jeeves' search technology.