Sphere : blog search engine
Search Engine Watch post about the launch of the new awaiting blog search engine, Sphere…still is in closed beta (I checked in my backlog of unread emails and found I had a password so I checked it out).
From the article:
“Sphere takes a new approach to blog search, looking at three critical variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on. As with web search, Sphere attempts to understand link structures—who’s linking to whom, and what are the quality of the links. Crucial to this analysis is an attempt to understand who’s starting or leading discussions in contrast to those bloggers who are simply commenting on existing conversations.
Sphere also looks at meta data—things like posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other non-keyword related data.
And finally, Sphere’s algorithm content does some heavy lifting with semantic analysis of blog postings. “It’s the hard part, and most important piece of the secret sauce,” said Sphere co-founder Steve Nieker. Sphere doesn’t use tags in its ranking of blog posts, even if they exist.”
Very clean interface and lots of targeted searching:
- boolean
- brackets
- phrase
- date
- blog site search
- search in blog post titles
Example…blog:”library clips” title:ziki
Or I could of used…site:libraryclips.blogsome.com title:ziki
Choose between relevance or time for results
On the results sidebar is a list of recommended blogs
Each result has a search feed
Each hit in the results has a brief profile of the blog and a link to the larger profile page
- avg. posts/week
- avg. words/post
- avg. links/post
- last Three links In
- last Three links Out
Bookmarklet to see related posts for the page you are on
Submit a blog
Coming soon
- related posts for each search result
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