This interview with Sphere co-founder Tony Conrad is continued from page one.
How does Sphere's relevance rank compare to Google Blog Search's "sorted by relevance?"
Sphere is less than one year old, still dealing with fairly limited resources, so we don't want to go too nuts, but the numbers are looking very promising when compared to Google Blog Search, or for that matter, any other blog search engine - Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, etc.
How does Google Blog Search compare to Sphere?
Specifically, Google is an RSS feed engine, not a dedicated blog search engine, so it's not completely relevant for blog search. Not a great user experience today. But in the near future it could be the right way to do it.
Traditional media and blogs are very different things; one's editorialized and one's opinion-based, and the format is radically different. Traditional media tends to be long articles, blogs are shorter. The best blogs out there are quick to the point, interactive, informal. We think we've nailed how blog format is put out and searched.
One day we'd like to see totally integrated results (color coding?) to distinguish what's out there; but that's not the direction we're heading towards necessarily right now. That's a BIG vision. Right now ours boils down to can we create a good blog search experience.
How fast does Sphere index blogs?
Our indexing speed is very fast. We crawl blogs about every thirty minutes, and we want to get that down to every ten minutes. Most blog search engines crawl blogs about every two hours.
What's the "Featured Blogs" all about?
Sphere's featured blogs is a way to find even more blogs in any particular topic, it's our attempt to identify ten or so really good blogs. Readers can suggest a blogger, a book, a podcast, etc. - it's very interactive. We want people's input because it IS the blogosphere, people are used to shaping the conversation. We're interested in hearing what they have to say.
The featured blogs widget is still in beta at this time (May 2006), we only have about 10K keywords that connect to a thousand topics.
What about this "prounoun checker"?
The pronoun checker as mentioned by Om Malik is just one variable of many that Sphere uses to find and rank blogs. It doesn't shape the algorithm as far as determining authority, but it determines basic characteristics of what the blog is about. If you look at really good blogs you don't see a lot of "I", necessarily. Live Journal, which targets the younger demographic, that's where you'll see lots of "I".
This interview with Sphere co-founder Tony Conrad is continued on page three.
