Sphere Blog Search is a Contender

TechCrunch demonstrates the cool features in Sphere, a brand new blog search engine that opened widely to the public today. Sphere includes a number of nice features and tools:

* custom range histogram;
* a "sphere it" bookmarklet
* top queries this hour/ this week;
* RSS
* expanded related news articles coverage

Sphere is a welcome addition to the blog search crowd, which Technorati has largely dominated. Competition is good for everyone, including Technorati. It's beautiful to look at, simple to use and delivers excellent results. A seven-day search for Edelman turned up 445 results on Sphere and 462 results on Google Blog Search.

However, it's missing several key features - authority rankings, mobile search, tag search and the ability to sort through results in different languages. Worst of all there's no link search. So I can't tell if someone is linking to me using the phrase "this guy" or "Steve says." This last point is unacceptable. (Update: It has link search. You need to use the phrase "SphereIt:")

Still, I like Sphere a lot and I am wholeheartedly recommending it. It's drop dead simple to use and it has some nice features. If it adds a few more it can be a serious contender to T'Rati. The key here is going to be speed. How fast is Sphere vs. T'Rati. I see no way to ping them, which is not a good sign. We should run it through some benchmarks.

Technorati Tags: Google Blog Search, Sphere, Technorati