Sphere Searches the Blogosphere - How it Works
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Sphere's algorithm examines three factors that are very important to sorting blogs and delivering the best results to searchers. The first of these factors is the link structure. Sphere dives in and tries to decipher the complicated issue of who is linking to what. That might seem somewhat straightforward with a traditional search engine, but it's not so obvious with blogs. You see, because the blog community is so interactive, you often have "conversation starters" and those who simply follow along, linking to the discussion or commenting on it. By analyzing the link structures, Sphere gains some idea of which blogs are acting as authorities.
The second factor is the meta data, or information about the blog itself aside from its content. How frequently does the blog writer post? How long is a typical post? How many links does the average post get? These and other factors are considered part of the meta data, and are tracked by Sphere's algorithm.
The third factor is what Tony Conrad and the other co-founders clearly consider to be the biggest point that differentiates Sphere from the other blog search engines on the Internet. It's called content semantic analysis, and Sphere co-founder Steve Nieker maintains that "it's the hard part, and most important ingredient of the secret sauce." This is important because spam blogs (of the sort that just say "porn" repeatedly, for instance) will go to the bottom of the search results, while the most relevant blogs will come to the top.
Om Malik noted something in his blog entry about Sphere that seems related to this content semantic analysis. The algorithm apparently includes a pronoun checker. If a blog tends to use "I" a lot, then it's probably more personal and less focused on the kinds of topics that the searcher is looking for. That seems intuitively correct to me. I'd expect to be most interested in the personal blogs of people I already know, and when I want to find those I wouldn't use a search engine.
Next: Sphere in Action >>
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