Tag: sphere

Search Engines, Technology

Brief blog search engine review

I have been trying a number of blog search engines recently.

I have subscribed to searches for the same terms in Technorati, Ice Rocket, PubSub and Sphere.

Sphere is the newest player on the blog search engine block, only coming out of beta last weekend. The search is adequate – I searched for “technorati blocked by China“, a story I broke here and was heavily linked to and quoted as a result, but my post on this is not found by Sphere. The searches I subscribed to using Sphere again didn’t return as many results as the other search engines and did contain some spam!

PubSub produced the lowest number of results of the four compared and often the results were late i.e. they were found by the other search engines much earlier (often days earlier).

Ice Rocket produced by far the most results of any of the search engines but those results were full of spam – finding the real information amongst the spam was difficult!

And Technorati was still the best of the four. Very timely results and very little spam.

Conclusion
It is always advisable to use more than one blog search engine for subscribed searches. In this scenario I would advise using Technorati and Sphere. Although Sphere doesn’t yet have as many results as the others, it does appear to be improving.

Also, I had an issue with Sphere earlier in the week so I contacted the CEO, Tony Conrad – he replied to my email and had Steve Nieker the CIO follow up – it is great to see companies getting directly in touch with their users in this way.

Ice Rocket needs to seriously address the spam problem it has and PubSub, I’m sorry to say, looks like it is no longer at the races.

Blogging, Business blogging, Search Engines, Technology

Sphere – a new blog search engine – reviewed

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has written a review of Sphere – a new blog search engine which, he says

quite frankly blows everything, and I mean everything, I’ve seen out of the water in terms of relevance (and, by the way, design…Adaptive Path was involved).

Sphere’s search tackles the thorny issue of relevance by having

an analysis of links into and out of a blog, an analysis of metadata around a post (links, post frequency, length of posts, etc.), and something Tony calls their “secret sauce�, which is content semantic analysis to filter out spam and to understand what a blog post is talking about.

The results

show only two posts per blog on the first page, so no one blog can dominate a category. The result set has auto-generated profiles of blogs that include recent links in and out of the blog, average posts per week, average words per post and a link to a full page profile that can be edited by the blog author.

Sphere has apparently been indexing blogs since January 2003 so you would imagine they have a fairly comprehensive database to start from!

You can sign up for a beta of Sphere here and see the screenshot Michael put up here.