Ask Launches Big News In Collaboration With Digg

Ask has launched a new news site, called Big News, that uses a complex algorithm to rank news, then displays it in a bold, modern interface. Big News ranks stories according to a “Big Factor“, a ranking score that takes into account how fresh the news is, the amount of links it has in articles, multimedia and blogs, the amount of rich content in the article (images and video), and the amount of discussion the story is getting on social sites.

The site was developed at least partly as a partnership with Digg, though that is not immediately apparent when using Big News. The amount of Diggs and comments a story has on Digg is a factor in the Big Factor algorithm, and the bottom of the homepage contains a Digg footer. Half the footer shows the current top five stories on Digg, the other half contains the […]

See original post by Nathan Weinberg