Sphere Searches the Blogosphere - Sphere in Action
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So what is it like to use Sphere to search for blogs? It boasts a very clean interface, judging from the screen shots I've seen. You can sort entries by relevance or time, of course. Results include a title and a paragraph from the blog post. You can click on the link to the post, or you can also click on a red "profile" link. This gives you a pop-up window that shows you the title of the blog, its link, the average number of posts per week, average words per post, and average links per posts, as well as its recent links to other blogs. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of people doing a blog search are looking not only for information, but a new blog to read, and this kind of data can help them decide.
If you're looking for results by date, you can use a drop-down menu to check the last four months, last week (default), last day, last 12 hours, or last hour. How's that for up-to-the-minute? You can also choose to see blogs written in languages other than English.
One of Sphere's algorithms takes consistency of blogging on a particular topic over time into consideration. You can see the fruits of that algorithm in the "featured blogs" box that shows up to the right of your search results. Below that box you'll see another one for "related media," which displays links to news stories, books, podcasts, and photos related to your search terms.
If you know how to use Boolean operators, you can use them with Sphere. You can also limit your search in several other specific ways. You can tell Sphere to search only the titles of blog posts. You can also tell it to search only a specific blog (great if you remember a particularly excellent or humorous entry in a blog that you want to share with someone...but which entry was it?!). Or you can tell it to search only a particular website, which would work well if you know your target is on a site with multiple blogs.
I can easily see at least one way for Sphere to monetize itself with the "related media" box, though I'd rather see it use more conventional search-related ads than corrupt that box. It's a cool feature, and a good bet that someone looking for a blog on a particular topic might be interested in news and other items related to it as well. I don't consider myself a heavy blog reader, but I'm looking forward to seeing Sphere when it comes out of closed beta mode.
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