New Blog Search Engine -- Sphere

Since my experiences with Feedster went from exhilarating to depressing, I've been keeping my eyes peeled for new blogosphere search engines. And after trying out Sphere, I think I like it, but it does have some of the disadvantages of those blog search engines that index entire pages instead of just RSS feeds.

Sphere is available at http://www.sphere.com. Simple keyword search on the front page. I did a keyword search for blogosphere since I'm running a bit low on search suggestions today. I got 5879 results, default-sorted by relevance (more about that in a minute.) Results include blog title, snippet, and how many days ago the item was posted. Results also include this nifty thing called Profile.

Click on it and you'll get a popup with the URL of the blog's home page and some statistics (average posts per week, average words per post, and average links per post.) You'll also see the last three links into the blog and the last three links out. If you click on the "See More On: " at the end of the popup you'll get a full page of information with a few more statistics (like number of blogs linking to the blog you're looking at.) This is a nice feature!

As I said the results are ordered by relevance, but that's not quite correct. Results are taken from a specified time frame -- from the last hour to the last four months; you can also set up a custom range with sliders -- and then those results are sorted by either relevance or date. Nice when you're looking for information only over a certain time period, but want the good stuff to rise to the top.

If you're searching for topical words as opposed to very specific queries, you might want to also try the Featured Blog and Related Media searches on the right side of the results screen. Actually a Featured Blog search for cow brought nothing, but a Related Media search for same brought images, news stories, podcasts, and book links all in one handy screen.

My biggest problem with Sphere was the fact that it apparently indexes full sites and not RSS feeds only. This means that occasionally you'll get a result, go look at it, and see that it's on the bottom of a long blog page. Or you'll search for a blog name and find zillions of instances of it, but not as post mentions, but as inclusions on a blogroll. Setting narrow timeframes for the search results (a week or ten days) seems to tone down this problem some.

Sphere offers keyword-based RSS feeds of its search results (and they've been added to Kebberfegg) and a couple of additional tools, including a bookmarklet.

Posted to Internet-Weblogs-Search