Sphere.com: Blog Search that Works

I get some of my best information from blogs. When you have thousands and thousands of brilliant minds blogging their ideas for all to share it’s an amazing thing: great information happens. Unfortunately, a lot of crap happens too.

I have tried to use blog search engines like Technorati and IceRocket, but to be quite honest, the results I got back were not at all useful.

Recently tested the beta of a new blog search engine called Sphere. My opinion of blog search engines has changed.

My Test

I am in the online travel business, I build travel web sites. I am always interested in travel industry news and affiliate marketing tips. Unfortunately, the terms for the searches in this area tend towards a lot of spam blogs. “Book your vacation on Travelocity here!” “Super-Easy Affiliate Marketing Tips to Make You Rich Overnight!”

Luckily, these are also good terms to use to see if a search engine is doing a good job seperating the wheat from the chaff. So I used the terms “Travelocity” and “Affiliate Marketing” and searched each phrase on Sphere.com, Technorati and IceRocket.

Comparing Results: Search Term “Travelocity”

Sphere.com
Out of the top 10 results, 4 were good articles, 2 were inane personal musings, 2 were on a site that appeared to slap up travel-related stories to get traffic and 2 were obviously a travel splog (spam blog). Verdict: 4 worthwhile links.

Technorati
Of the top 10 results, one was a good article, one was just a link to a good article, two were personal musings, 4 were splogs and 2 were in Chinese or Japanese. Verdict: one worthwhile link.

IceRocket
Of the top 10 results, one was just a link to a good article, two were personal musings, 7were splogs. Verdict: nothing worthwhile.

Comparing Results: Search Term “Affiliate Marketing”

Sphere.com
Out of the top 10 results, 4 were good articles, 2 were rather cheesey articles, 2 were RSS splogs and 2 were affiliate marketing get-rich schemes. Verdict: 4 worthwhile links.

Technorati
Of the top 10 results, one was a good article, the rest were get rich schemes and other splog. Verdict: one worthwhile link.

IceRocket
Of the top 10 results there was nothing but splogs and get rich schemes. Verdict: nothing worthwhile.

One Feature That Should Be Ubiquitous

IceRocket has a nice “Exclude” feature that the other sites would do well to emulate. Unfortunately it’s wasted on IceRocket; there is too much junk returned to make it worth the effort to weed out the bad results.

Conclusion

Sphere is the first blog search engine that comes close to having enough relevant results to make a blog search useful. Technorati and IceRocket both do a terrible job of determining relevance and, unless they make some major changes quickly, run the risk of becoming irrelevant themselves.