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Is Sphere winning at blog search?
For a company that has only been around a few months, Sphere.com seems to have already made quite a mark, including signing on for a trial with Time magazine that involves putting “Sphere It” links on Time stories. Clicking the link does the same thing as the Sphere It bookmarklet — that is, it searches the blogosphere for posts that are relevant to the story or page being viewed.
To me, the fact that Sphere has managed to strike such a deal when Technorati.com is already well-established in that area (it has arrangements with the Washington Post and Newsweek, among others) is indicative of how wide-open the whole field of blog search still is. Remember when Google’s blog search launched, and how excited everyone was? And yet, Google’s size and might doesn’t seem to have translated into dominance — in fact, its blog search is distinctly underwhelming. Icerocket.com, formerly owned by Mark Cuban, is a little better but not much.
Even Technorati.com, the kingpin of the field, often produces results that aren’t particularly relevant. Although my own demo of Sphere over the past while has been hit and miss, there have been several occasions in which it came up with distinctly more useful links than Technorati. The reason for this appears to be that Sphere — which uses software from predecessor companies Waypath and Yodel — does a “semantic analysis” of the text in a page and uses that to judge relevance, rather than just tracking raw links as Technorati.com does.
Susan Mernit is no doubt right that being in the right place at the right time and having a cool widget also makes a difference, but I think the search technology matters too. Sphere may not be perfect, but it’s better than we had before, and it’s certainly better than what we get from the king of search — Google — which seems like a real missed opportunity. Maybe Google is too busy launching things like Google Notebook and Google (chicken) Coop.
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Blog search is actually amazingly niche, if you think about it - what much is there to search over blogs in specific, beyond ego and punditry-junkies?
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Take for example the Buzz graph on Mathew's site for Myspace mentions. I have previously used this feature to try to get some idea of the relative traction of different technologies in the same space. For example: Sxip, LID, and OpenID in the identity 2.0 space. It turns out that LID has an order of magnitude more buzz going on about it, which means that if I have to choose only one to implement, it's probably going to be LID.
The bottom line is that I've never really thought of Technorati as a blog search tool. Also, I believe it's misguided to see blog search as a useless niche. What's relevant is that the blogosphere has structure and that structure can be mined to discover something about what's really going on in the public consciousness. Truly, Google has let a fabulous opportunity pass them by, perhaps because they prefer to keep the raw data about structure to themselves. For opening it up to the rest of us (at least in the blogging realm), Technorati still deserves some credit. If Sphere intends to be a Technorati-killer, let's hope they jump on the structure-mining bandwagon as well.
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