New Blog Search Engine Sphere Launches
Michael Arrington
90 comments »
New blog search engine Sphere launched just moments ago and has also announced a $3.75 million round of venture financing. In addition to covering the launch of Sphere here, we have a podcast interview with CEO Tony Conrad and advisor Toni Schneider over at TalkCrunch.
Sphere, which follows in the footsteps of previous blog search engines like Feedster, Technorati and IceRocket, as well as offerings from Google and Yahoo, is doing things quite a bit differently than its predecessors (and its evolved dramatically since our first look at it back in October).
Sphere’s design, by the way, was created by Adaptive Path. See their essay on the project here.
The site is segmented into three main areas: blog search results, featured blogs, and related media.
Blog Search Results
Sphere search results can be viewed by date, relevance or a combination of both. Unlike Technorati, which determines a blog’s relevance based on the total number of unique links into that blog, Sphere is taking an algorithmic approach. For Sphere, “relevance” is based on three key factors: links in/out of blog; meta data around the blog (average length of posts, post frequency, etc; and a semantic analysis of the posts themselves). In our tests Sphere blog relevance is very good. We’ll do a more in depth review and comparison at a later date.
Another feature is a “custom date search”. In addition to preset date selections, if you do a custom date search by selecting it in the drop down box, you’ll get results just for that date range and you’ll also see a day by day breakdown showing results per day with the included term.
Each search result has a link to a blog profile that includes basic blog information (links in and out, average post frequency and length and additional information). In the future an extended profile for each blog will be available that will include information from the blogger as well, such as a photo, a zip code for geotagging, and topics the blog covers.
Featured Results
The most relevant blogs for thousands of search terms are listed in the “featured results” area.
If you don’t see search results for what you are looking for, click over the the most highly rated blogs for your search term to research further. These results are based on the same algorithmic analysis as blog search.
Related Media
Want to go beyond blogs for your research? Click on “related media” and see related pictures, news, books and podcasts relevant to your query.
More Tools
As great as the basic search platform is, what I like best about Sphere is in the Tools area. Install the “Sphere It” bookmarklet and click it whenever you are reading something that you’d like more information on. Sphere will analyze the page in real time and present blog search results that are relevant to that topic. It’s important to note that this is not a search to find blogs linking into that page you are viewing; rather you are finding fresh blog content that is related to the subject matter of what you are reading. I’ve tested this and find it extremely useful.
Congratulations to the Sphere team for getting this launched, and taking blog seach another step or two forward.
I love the custom range widget!!!!
The bookmarklet feature is quite nifty. I like tha ability to find similar blog content. As a blogger, I wish they had the blogging tools that technorati has though. Maybe it’s on the way.
That being said, the ui is pretty slick and easy to use. Not sure why if it’s better than technorati though?
Seems FeedBurner had advance knowledge of Sphere. They’ve been offering a “Related posts from Sphere” FeedFlare for a while now.
Nice design and colors to go!!
P-
3.75 mil for a blog search engine? Yeesh.
The date slider is a nice approach, but lacks in usability.
The date visualization reveals the “histogram” of the search term at a glance. The clean and simple design is appealing.
But this seems to be a perfect example where AJAX is necessary: The reloading after a new date range selection not only takes some time, but the Flash movie must initialize again. Therefore it is nearly unusable.
An another improvement would be to use an alpha-slider instead of a simple range slider.
Overall a good idea (”Use more InfoVis”), but the implementation could be more sophisticated.
They’re definately entering a crowded market - both from the dedicated blog search engines like technorati and traditional search engines like Y! and G. It reminds me a bit of the whole hotbot/altavista/excite/etc. search wars of 2000
That said the implimentation is top notch. The features, design, algorithm, and speed make it far more effective then Technorati IMO.
What really impressed me the most however was the speed of the site. Most sites slow down to a crawl when they’re featured on TechCrunch, but this one operated nearly as fast as google. Impressive!
“New blog search engine Sphere launched just moments ago”
Just went there a second ago. Unless my proxy is caching the site, it seems to not be accepting apps still.
Another contender enters the arena! Another ego feed resource complicates our lives!
I’m excited to give Sphere a whirl - thanks for the scoop, Mike.
Sphere is nicely appointed…the question is does it deliver fast and more relevant results than the competitors…who will soon go about duping Sphere’s feature set…it’s good to see some more inspired competition on the blog search front
Well worth the wait, looking forward to using Sphere …
I have been using Sphere since about last October, and I have been impressd. I found that it churned out many good results, much better than the feature filled Technorati (thought I like it still). The new features added with Sphere’s release look good.
Good idea - but, they certainly need to add many more Blogs and Bloggers.
Was doing a search for
Google - and another for - Search Engine Optimization.
The results were quite sparse.
Had to submit Matt Cutts blog just a few minutes ago. It wasn’t even there, and its been in the technorati top 100!
Is there going to be a Sphere API? It looks ripe for mashing!
It is pretty cool, but it is clearly going to take time for it to actually build up the number of blogs in its database.
It’s blog index needs to build out as well as filter out blog spam. This isn’t ready for deep drilling local blog searches.
If there is to be competition it may be around who has the better, smarter algorhythyms. The new webs will be built on them. Sphere’s first steps towards ‘filtering’ the web are great.
Forget about the web for a sec and note that individual communities have implicit algorhythyms (criterias) that build communities. Can these be programmed in the virtual world? Over time, organically, yes.
Perhaps Sphere can take a cue from American Idol — call it — ‘Website Ideal’! But the algorhythym works as it produces a Kelley Clarkson and a whole group of young talented singers.
It seems to be happening with the ranking thing naturally. Just needs to be centralized I guess.
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I have just uploaded 20,000+ articles to my site that are content heavy and are great for sites with google ads. You can have them all its over 90 mb large, but you need to find the link with in the articles. So that means you have to read the articles in order to find the link I change the location once a day, it may be in the mesothelioma page, debt page, or loans page. Again its over 90 megs large with 20,000 + articles. And you can have them all.
Its a great search engine to use but lacking in the number of sites it contains. I’ve tried it with some well established blogs that you’d expect to be there but they are not. Hey ho. I just wish my to anyone that will give Google a run for its money