This morning we covered the reaction around the forums of the nofollow attribute. In that entry, I noted that Ask Jeeves was the lone engine of the major 4 to not join in on this announcement. So I took the liberty to email Jim Lanzone, a VP over at Ask Jeeves, to ask why. He said;
We talked with Matt Cutts yesterday about it and wished them well. It's a good idea and we wholeheartedly support the fight against spam. (I believe in the past Mr. Gardi has threatened to track spammers down personally to deliver that message. :)) And it's good to see the engines collaborating on something positive. On the other hand, when it comes to our particular engine, we didn't need to make a snap decision here. The nofollow idea is more urgent for Google (and those with similar approaches) than for Ask because they use global popularity (PageRank) while we use the local popularity approach pioneered by Teoma. I'm sure we'll add support for the new tag at some point in the near future if it makes sense. Blogs are a great source of authoritative information, regardless of their global pop ranking, which is what we pride ourselves on finding for our users.
I will go add this bit of information to the SEW Forum thread and see how people chew on that.
