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.
