Alright. I suppose there is no one perfect way to search for stuff on blogs. Sure, there are a number of effective search engines to do the job, but one company believes they have a better approach than the existing options.

The blogosphere continues to both fascinate and frustrate, because great content is out there, but it’s often drowned in a sea of garbage. Newly launched Sphere aims to change that with a different approach to blog search.

Blog search has yet to rise to the quality of web search, in large part because the blogopshere is volatile and many of the ranking metrics that work well with web content break down when applied to blog postings. Other approaches rely on tags to identify relevant content—and we’re highly skeptical about tagging here at Search Engine Watch.

Sphere’s creators are veterans of several internet startups who’ve applied the lessons they’ve learned from previous companies (Oddpost, Wordpress and others) to build a powerful, but easy-to-use blog search engine, with a number of interesting twists.

“Once you’ve discovered good blog content it’s like a drug,” said Tony Conrad, Sphere CEO.

Sphere takes a new approach to blog search, looking at three critical variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on. As with web search, Sphere attempts to understand link structures—who’s linking to whom, and what are the quality of the links. Crucial to this analysis is an attempt to understand who’s starting or leading discussions in contrast to those bloggers who are simply commenting on existing conversations.

Sphere also looks at meta data—things like posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other non-keyword related data.

And finally, Sphere’s algorithm content does some heavy lifting with semantic analysis of blog postings. “It’s the hard part, and most important piece of the secret sauce,” said Sphere co-founder Steve Nieker. Sphere doesn’t use tags in its ranking of blog posts, even if they exist…. Source: Search Engine Watch

[tags]sphere,bloggers,blogopshere,drug,blog search[/tags]