Have you ever been frustrated by blog searches that show more blog spam than the kinds of real gems you know are out there among all the dross? The folks behind Sphere, a blog search engine so new it's still in closed beta, think they have the answer.
Traditional Internet search has come a long way since 1997. Unfortunately, many people will tell you that the same thing is not true when you're trying to search for relevant blog entries. Sure, there's great content out there, as you would expect from any medium that encourages enthusiasts to communicate about their favorite topics...but there's also a lot of garbage, and some very self-centered blogging (which can be entertaining, but might not be what you're looking for). Add in the spam blogs cluttering up the blogosphere (which I wrote about here http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine- News/Spamming-the-Blogosphere-the-Spread-of-Splogs/), and it's very easy to feel like you're adrift in a sea of flotsam and jetsam, looking for a decent raft.
This isn't to say that there aren't search engines dedicated to blogs out there. Technorati, Feedster, and Icerocket are three of the best known websites that offer blog search. A lot of the current blog search companies rely on tags and RSS feeds, and will do a straight sort by date, with most recent entries first. While this works to some degree, it doesn't work as well as you might think -- and if you can remember back to what web search was like back in 1997, you'll understand why. Tag-based searches are easy to overwhelm with spam. Also, just because an entry is the most recent doesn't mean it's the one that answers best to what the searcher is looking for. As with those pre-Google search engines, one of the biggest issues in blog search is relevance, but there are some interesting additional wrinkles that are almost unique to blog search.
In traditional Internet search, a lot of users are just looking for an answer to a question. With blog search, a user might be looking for a new blog to start reading regularly. Being able to say that a particular blog is relevant and authoritative -- which may have a slightly different meaning in the blogosphere than it does in traditional Internet search -- matters a great deal. The newness of content becomes a special issue as well; it makes the blogosphere very volatile, and more challenging to keep track of, in its way, than news. And do I need to mention that the amount of linking that goes on with blogs can overwhelm traditional search engines? (In fact, that's a tactic that some SEOs have used to raise the PageRank for their websites, but a discussion of that is beyond the scope of this article).
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