Looking at Sphere Blog Search and the Sphere It Bookmarklet

By Michael Gray
In Blogs, News, Tools  

I filled out an invite to be part of the beta program for Sphere blog search a long time ago when Steve Rubel mentioned it back in October. I never was accepted but I was notified this morning it was live and I could blog about it after 7am so here goes.

The most interesting component of Sphere is the bookmarklet called “sphereit”. The instruction on how to make it work are pretty simple and can be found on on the tools page so there’s no need for me to repeat it here. Once installed I needed a test case, I cruised over to Google news and found this story on Amazon using MSN instead of Google for A9. Clicking the Sphereit button yielded the the following screen:

Click to Enlarge SphereIt Blog Search

I’ve labeled each of the sections to make explaining it a bit easier:

1. Search Box: SHows that I used the sphere it bookmarklet and the URI for the subject.
2. Time frame: Choose from last hour, last 12 hours, last day, last week, last 4 months. Cool if you want to follow a story that has been going on and you want only fresh results (hey Google see it’s not just about authority freshness counts too)
3. Relevance: Sort by authority or reverse chronological order (newest first)
4. Language: Lets you limit your search only to english or any language
5. Permalink: The title for the listing links back to the permalink for that article
6. Site Link: Links back to the main site for the permalink listed.
7. Profile: Provides some basic info about the site such as average number of posts per week, average number of words, average links per post, links to the last set of posts, and links to more posts indexed from that domain. Feeding the ego search on the blogosphere a key component.
8. Age: Gives a rough idea how old the post is.
9. RSS: RSS feed to repeat the search. Not useful for this example search but pretty easy to see how it could be useful for subject, theme, vanity, or ego tracking.
10. Blank Space: Lots of obvious blank space, place holder for advertising?

Now that we’ve gotten past the mechanics what do I think, I like that I can easily limit the time frame for my search that’s really important. Giving me the ability to change from a relevance to stritcly chronological sort isn’t quite as useful, and may be “giving away the goods” on a the ranking algo. I totally love the RSS feed button.

Let’s look at a keyword search for example [google calendar] I’ve marked the new areas in the screen shot below:

Click to Enlarge Sphere Blog Search

1. Multiple Listings: Multiple clustered listings from one search, usually a good thing.
2. Domain Search: Lists pages only from that domain (you lose the topic search)
3. Featured Blogs: Lists blogs that have been selected to be noteworthy. On that page there is a “suggest a blogger” link (hint, hint, wink, wink nudge nudge)
4. Related Media: Links to another page with photos from webshots also has link. Links to Yahoo News books and podcasts, suggest links for all sections. (screen shot below)

Click to Enlarge Sphere Media Search

I really like the related media section, the images search links seemed to be broken as of this writing so hopefully they will fix that. Not sure why the didn’t go with the obvious and more content rich Flickr, especially since they are using Yahoo to distribute news stories and podcast search results. Maybe if I shamelessly link to Jeremy, he’ll catch this and suggest it to the right people (we had the same taste in “I’m not Matt Cutts” t-shirts so worth a shot).

Overall impression this is a pretty good implementation. Google Blog Search kinda sucks, and Yahoo burried Yahoo Blog Search in Yahoo news (hint to Yahoo no one is going to take you as a serious blog search player if you don’t think it’s serious enough to exist on it’s own not the foster child of news searches).

What Other Blogs had to Say about Sphere Blog Search

Steve Rubel Micro Persuasion: Sphere Blog Search is a Contender

Sphere is a welcome addition to the blog search crowd, which Technorati has largely dominated. Competition is good for everyone, including Technorati. It’s beautiful to look at, simple to use and delivers excellent results.

Chris Sherman from Search Engine Watch Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search

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.

TechCrunch » New Blog Search Engine Sphere Launches

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).

Microbrands and Micromarketing Sphere Search Engine For Blogosphere at Customers On Fire

It does have some interesting features in that you can view a “profile” of a blog before you visit, it outlines how many links are incoming and outgoing, and provides some data on the average length of posts and number of links per post.

Ben Metcalfe Blog Sphere blog search launches

In conclusion, I would say Sphere is worth keeping an eye on as they bring on new features, however I’ll stick to my existing blog search tools for the time being.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blog search, sphere, sphere blog search, sphere it

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