New blog search engine Sphere launches

A new blog search engine launched called Sphere. Sphere, which follows in the footsteps of previous blog search engines like Feedster, Technorati and IceRocket, as well as offerings from Google and Yahoo, is doing things quite a bit differently than its predecessors.

Sphere search results can be viewed by date, relevance or a combination of both. Unlike Technorati, which determines a blog’s relevance based on the total number of unique links into that blog, Sphere is taking an algorithmic approach. For Sphere, “relevance” is based on three key factors: links in/out of blog; meta data around the blog (average length of posts, post frequency, etc; and a semantic analysis of the posts themselves).

Another feature is a “custom date search”. In addition to preset date selections, if you do a custom date search by selecting it in the drop down box, you’ll get results just for that date range and you’ll also see a day by day breakdown showing results per day with the included term.

Each search result has a link to a blog profile that includes basic blog information (links in and out, average post frequency and length and additional information). In the future an extended profile for each blog will be available that will include information from the blogger as well, such as a photo, a zip code for geotagging, and topics the blog covers.

via TechCrunch