Sphere Arrives Late to the Blog Search Battlefield

Posted on May 2, 2006

Sphere is a new blog search engine. The company has raised $3.75 million in venture capital after being in beta testing for several months. Information about Sphere's design and results filter can be found on this post by Sphere creators Adaptivepath.com. Blogspotting's Stephen Baker likes Sphere's custom day search. Steve Rubel, who calls Sphere a contender, also says that Sphere has a link search called Sphere It. However, the Sphere It tool Rubel is talking about does not work like a link citations search. The Sphere It command finds blog posts that relate to the content of the page you're reading not just the inbound links. This may actual make it more useful for blog readers. Bloggers (blog owners) will also want a fast, easy blog citations search that sorts inbound links by date.

Everyone knows that Steven Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner ignited the blogosphere (especially political blogs) so let's see how Sphere does with a "Colbert" search.

Sphere shows 4,402 results from the last week.

Technorati shows at least 7,000 results from the last two days -- a guesstimate by looking at the Technorati graph.

BlogPulse shows over 24,000 posts from the last week.

Google Blogsearch shows 1,800 results for the last two days alone.

Sphere gets beaten easily in the number of posts but the biggest difference is when you sort by time. The most recent post Sphere shows you on a Colbert search (as of this writing) is already over an hour old while Technorati shows you blog posts made during the last few minutes. If this is typical of Sphere for other search results then Sphere will be an irrelevant blog search engine for breaking news.

Several other bloggers, in addition to Steve Rubel, also think Sphere still has a chance despite being very, very late to the blog search party.

Mark Evans says, "Sphere has also raised $3.75-million in venture capital but Om Malik makes a good point that company is going to need more to compete against Technorati, Ice Rocket, Google, Blogdigger, et al. Still, there's always room for a new player with an edge. After all, Google entered the search market as a nobody and now rules the world. Sphere's financing comes from Hearst Publishing, Trident Capital and About.com (the New York Times)."