Did Ask Jeeves ask enough questions?

Only a day after Ask Jeeves announced its acquisition of Bloglines, CNET releases a preview of NewsBurst, its own web-based RSS reader. According to Steve Rubel, the launch of NewsBurst follows the launch of similar branded RSS readers by The Guardian and LA Times last week.

There's a simple reason content companies are trying to get into the RSS reader market:

Branded RSS readers come pre-loaded with RSS feeds from the content provider. That locks in customers and guarantees traffic. Hosting the RSS reader on the content provider's web site also makes that site the customer's destination of choice.

So we should expect a proliferation of branded RSS readers from other large content providers as well. Smaller content providers will partner with RSS reader providers, as Hollywood Media has done with Pluck.

Meanwhile, the desktop RSS reader market is also moving fast. Om Malik reports that You Software has released You Subscribe, which integrates RSS capabilities with Microsoft Outlook.

All of which leads to the obvious question: Did Ask Jeeves ask enough questions about the RSS reader market before deciding to acquire Bloglines?

This is Jason Calacanis' comment on Bloglines:

It’s a horrible business and it will never make  money.

Congratulations and respect to Mark for having the sense to dump the business now when it has some perceived value. However, I can tell you clearly there is no business model for web-based news readers, and in two years 95-99% of the RSS reader market will be consolidated into three of the following players: My Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Google’s RSS reader (if and when it comes out… I have no inside information here), and maybe an Open Source version integrated into Firefox and/or Thunderbird.

(His entire post is important reading for anyone thinking about the monetization of RSS.)

Bottom line:
Competition in the RSS reader market is exploding. Many people argued that Bloglines' had unique value in its archive of blog posts, but I'm skeptical.

Did the Ask Jeeves management team do a simple search for "RSS reader" using their own search service? And if so, did they notice that Bloglines only comes up 17th in the list of results?

ASKJ chart below.