TechCrunch has a review of the soon to be launched (in beta) Sphere Blog Search Engine:
‘Relevance in blog search is very difficult. Google-type PageRank analysis, which looks at incoming links to a piece of content, simply doesn’t work because new content doesn’t have much in the way of links. Until now, no one has come up with a way to properly sort blog posts by relevance, and the general default way of showing results is “reverse-chrono”, which simply puts the newest stuff at the top.
Sphere appears to have solved the problem, or at least taken big steps in the right direction. Their approach involves three key algorithms – 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.’
I’m quite looking forward to seeing what they’ve come up with over at Sphere (where you can now apply to be a part of the beta).
Very interesting field – thought that Technorati and its competitors had solved it but it’s far from over. I’m trying to hack on blog and RSS searching myself. If nothing else works, it can be used for SEO!
I’m actually in the Sphere program. However, I’ve not seen any sort of traffic come my way. In contrary, more traffic comes out…
I get one or two referrals from sphere, but I’ll stick with them because they do give my readers an option, so they at least know that they can come to my site and have an out at the same time…