Sphere - New blog search engine

Happen to check out Sphere today. It looks really cool.

"Sphere it!" ...this is really cool.. Also the first thing that stikes is the simplicity of the UI. It is lot less cluttered than the Technorati and Feedster




I can restrict the blogs based on time..





Search results grouped into three categories...I can also see the profile of the blogger appearing in the search results.


Graphical UI for setting up custom date range to filter the search results..

I can order the results by relavency or time.



Search results include rich metadata about the blog including the average number of posts, length of post and average links to the post. These would certaintly help me to make a rough guess if the post is authentic




In "related media" section I get to see other types of media(photos, books, podcasts ad news) matching my search criteria





Start your own wordpress or typepad blog without leaving the search page..



All in all, it looks real neat and the search results come out real quick. One thing that need to be checked is the relevancy of the results as compared to Technorati. Theoretically it is said that Sphere's ranking alogorithm is superior to that of Technorati's as the former uses lot of other factors other than just the number of people linking to the blog, to decide the popularity of the blog and to weed out spam blogs. Also news is that, like Technorati, Sphere also does not crawl and index myspace blogs :( .

So Sphere looks good with lot of new features. Now how much of a competition is it to Technorati is to be seen.