Ask and Digg Team Up for Big News

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Ask has just launched a news site called Big News in partnership with Digg that, from the looks of things, only partially incorporates social news functionality.

There were rumors just earlier this week that Digg was white labeling its technology for Ask. However, Big News is more akin to Google News or TechMeme than to Digg. The bulk of the news items collected and displayed from around the web are identified algorithmically, not socially.

Digg’s only clear influence on Big News shows up in the footer of the site, where you can view the current top five Diggs and five stories collected by Big News algorithmically that haven’t been Dugg yet. This real estate will help drive traffic to Digg and encourage the identification of interesting news stories. What does Ask get in return? That’s not altogether clear, although SAI hears that “Digg ratings factor into the site’s algorithm.”