Bloglines developing a blog search engine

In an interview, Mark Fletcher, the CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub. “The challenge,” he says, “is to create world-class blog search, which we don’t think exists now.”

Bloglines is one of the most popular online news aggregator but faces strong competition from emerging players like Pluck, Newsgator, Microsoft’s Start.com and even Findory which learns from the articles you read and surfaces other interesting weblog posts and news articles.

Bloglines has one big advantage - It has a huge subscriber base, they know what blogs are popular and what posts are most frequently viewed or emailed. This could be potentially a very big parameter in ranking blogs. We can also see a site search box from bloglines similar to Technorati Searchlet.

But how does Bloglines expect to make money ? Jack Krupansky has an interesting point - Google is now beta-testing AdSense ads that eventually I can put into my blogs and that users of Bloglines (and other aggregators) will then see. That will let me make a little money, but where’s Bloglines going to monetize their infrastructure and services?