Sphere Reviewed

Sphere is a blog search engine that's been in the works for a while (read my interview with Sphere co-founder Tony Conrad for more background information). My overall impression of Sphere is that it's a blog search engine with some great features, relevant results, and an excellent overall user experience.

Sphere - Simple and Functional

One of the first things you'll notice about Sphere is that it is extremely uncluttered. There's not a lot of "stuff" to look at or keep track of or attempt to figure out, and since I'm a big fan of uncluttered this was definitely a point in Sphere's favor. The home page has three different blog search tools for you to use: the main search bar, Top Searches this hour, and Top Searches this week. That's it.

However, the real "oomph" of Sphere starts coming into play when you start searching. For example, my search for web search brought back a ton of results, but Sphere gives you a lot of tools to sort multiple results, such as:

• Sort by time and relevance: You get multiple options in the sort by time drop down menu, including in the last hour, week, months, or - and this is big-time eye candy - in a custom range histogram. I'm such a sucker for gadgets, and I like them even more when they're functional. With the histogram, you can create your own time range with which to view blog conversations.
• Language: You can limit your blogs to only English results or in any language, a nice feature since most of the blogs in the blogosphere actually are not English-language.

Sphere Featured Blogs

Finding blogs in a particular niche - good blogs - has long been an issue with blog search engines, since there's just so much content out there it's difficult to sort through. Sphere addresses this issue with their Featured Blogs, a search option available to the right of any search results. For instance, in my previous query for "web search", I clicked on Featured Blogs and was able to find quite a few great blogs specifically focused on Web search, including the About Web Search blog (very cool).

Click on the plus sign next to any of these blogs and you'll get a brief profile of that blog - average posts per week, average words per post, and average links per post. My profile was WAY off, but this feature is still in beta, after all. If you don't see a blog that you think should be on there, you can click on the "suggest a blogger" link and suggest away.

Sphere Related Media

Right under the Featured Blogs button is the Related Media button - click on that and you'll be taken to a page of...well, related media. For example, my original query for Web search brought back lots of great Web search news, a few excellent Web search books that I really would like to get around to read, and some great Web search podcasts that looked extremely interesting (Sphere's podcast search is powered by Yahoo). This is just another example of Sphere integrating as much information as possible with your searches, but making it as relevant as possible as well. After all, what's the point of a ton of easily found information if hardly any of it is actually relevant?

Sphere Tools

You can check out the list of Sphere tools for yourself; these include the Sphere bookmarklet (a way to see what people are talking about in real time and join the conversation), the Sphere custom range histogram (as I already mentioned), and the Sphere search widget for Typepad, which is a great way to get more people to find more blogs from within your Typepad blog.

Sphere - A Blog Search Engine That Works

Sphere is simple, uncluttered, and functional. I found that Sphere delivered relevant results without a lot of fancy search tricks, which in the world of blog search engines is no small feat. I've already added Sphere to my list of essential Web search tools, and I suggest that you do the same - I don't think you'll be disappointed.