I recently read about Sphere the soon to be released blog search in a post by Rob Hof of the BusinessWeek Tech Beat blog. I tried to get into the Beta group but was not able to at the present time but appear to be on the waiting list. I read more about Sphere on the Sphere About page and came away with these questions:
1.) How does this new blog search going to work?
Is the search going to crawl the web or rely on pings from users? Sphere is supposed to work better then the current search engines and I am curious as to how this will be orchestrated to compete with IceRocket and Technorati and more recently Yahoo and Google. The about page talks of a relevancy based search as follows:“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.”
It will be interesting to see how that works.
2.) How will Sphere filter out spam?
It is mentioned in the About page but they do not go into detail. As co-manager of Splog Reporter, I am interested to see the efforts of other companies to combat spam blogs or splog.3.) What other unique features does this new blog search have to offer?
Obviously, the people behind Sphere know they have to compete with the big blog search engines and must have something unique to offer users. I cannot wait to see it in action.
Check out the blogosphere posts about Sphere on Web 2.0 Central, Jeremy Zawodny, Blogspotting, Changing Way, TechCrunch, and Tom Raftery's I.T. Views.
Has anyone else seen Sphere yet? If so, please comment on it. I would love to hear your feedback.
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» Sphere Blog Search Engine Needs To Train Old Dogs from Somewhat Frank
Sphere, a blog search engine, finally launched today (May 2, 2006) after much anticipation with a new look and logo since first hearing about Sphere in October 2005. My first impressions was that it presents a very simple interface [Read More]
Tracked on May 3, 2006 2:40:40 AM
I tried Sphere back in September but have since lost my invite code. IMHO it is the superior blog-search engine (especially if one considers relevancy to be the target). I periodically check back to see if it has been pulled of beta, only to be disappointed by more delay.
Posted by: Kenneth Jr | Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 11:12 PM