Om Malik writes about Sphere, a new blog search service that appears to be getting ready to launch.

Sphere is taking a crack at building a more relevant blog search engine. Traditional link analysis just doesn’t work with blog posts because new posts don’t have time to gather links. Instead, Sphere seems to be be trying to determine blog authority on a given subject area, and determine new authoritative blogs based on who those blogs point to.

From Sphere’s Learn More page:

What makes us better than existing blog search sites?

It starts with relevant results and fast performance. Our new relevance-based algorithm discovers new blog posts as they’re created, indexes them within minutes of being published, applies rich semantic analysis and makes them searchable by relevance or time. Plus, we’ve got a few fun, helpful features that we think make for a richer user experience.

Of course, there is no way to tell if Sphere has cracked the blog search relevance problem until they launch. I’m looking forward to finding out.

Thanks Richard for pointing me to this.