Buzzing about Sphere
Mike Arrington kicked off a new round of buzz in the blogosphere yesterday, with his review of the aptly-named Sphere. Sphere, for those not in the know, is a new blog search engine.
I’ve been on the Sphere beta for some months, but not used it much. My impressions:
-
Sphere It! is a genuinely useful feature. From any web page you are reading, you can punch the Sphere It! button, and see all the related commentary in the blogosphere.
-
I like the idea of Featured Results, but I don’t understand the selection criteria. Is it manual, or is there an algorithm?
-
The graphical custom date range seems to not work for me. I am not sure whether this is a browser security setting, or something else. More investigation is needed. In general, I would say Sphere’s knowledge of dates is flawed. For instance, just a few moments ago I wrote about Chris Anderson’s musings on Time and the Long Tail. Sphere indexed it very quickly, but thinks it was written 18 hours ago.
-
Creating a feed which is ranked by relevance doesn’t seem to work. I queried sphere for Voice 2.0, and then fed the proffered RSS feed to Bloglines which produced a very different set of results from the Sphere page I had just been looking at.
Sphere has lots of promise, and has earned a place in my toolkit for the "Sphere It!" feature. It seems unfinished, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get a lot of value from what’s there already.
