Spurred by early looks given to Jeremy and Om, I prodded Sphere CEO Tony Conrad to walk me through the beta of Sphere, his new blog search product (still in closed beta, but coming out in a month or two). It comes from a team out of Oddpost (Oddpost…
Spurred by early looks given to
Jeremy and
Om, I prodded Sphere CEO Tony Conrad to walk me through the beta of
Sphere, his new blog search product (still in closed beta, but coming out in a month or two). It comes from a team out of
Oddpost (Oddpost was planning to launch this there, but then got bought up by Yahoo. Oddpost founder
Toni Schneider remains an advisor to Sphere, though he now works at Yahoo. Other advisors include WordPress dude
Matt Mullenwegg and the irrepressible
Mary Hodder.)
The financials: Tony has taken angel money from some impressive folks – notably KP partners Will Hearst and Kevin Compton, among others. I think perhaps the most important decision for Sphere, having seen it, is what to do with the money that folks will want to throw at it, but more on that later.
Sphere works better than other blog search I’ve seen, plain and simple. Why? It uses a combination of factors to do a more robust ranking methodology of blogs and posts. It pays attention to the ecology of relationships between blogs, for example, and it gives a higher weighted value to links that have more authority. This will insure, for example, that when a Searchblog author goes off topic and rants about, say, Jet Blue, that that author’s rant will probably not rank as high for “Jet Blue” as would a reputable blogger who regularly writes about travel, even if that Searchblog author has a lot of high-PageRank links into his site.
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