San Francisco’s KGO-TV devoted a 4+ minute segment to Ask.com on Wednesday’s news. It’s rare for local TV news to give that much time to any one topic, and this turns out to be a nice commercial of sorts for the #4 search engine. CEO Jim Lanzone even manages to explain the algorithm in a nice, news-friendly way:

“The expert ranked algorithm is at the core of our search technology and it works differently than any other search engine out there in that it breaks down the Web by topic before determining popularity. So we’re not just trying to figure out what site is the most popular, we’re trying to figure out what site is the expert on the topic.”

Nothing earth-shattering in the piece; it talks a bit about local search, Ask X, and you’ll learn that Jeeves has apparently been cryogenically frozen in the company’s offices.

You can read the full story on KGO’s web site. Look on the right side for the streaming video, in which you’ll get to see and hear the likes of Greg Sterling and Bambi Francisco.