Sphere blog search launches

…first impressions: “yeah, so what?”.

Sphere, a new blog search engine, has just launched into public beta (actually not into beta, just launched!).

I’ve done a couple of searches on it and whilst I know it’s early days, search-wise I’m not sure there’s much being added to the party. The custom-date search is interesting, but that’s about it.

Clicking on the Related Media link returns pictures (from Webshots), podcasts (via Yahoo! Podcast API) and news stories. Interestingly, the cheeky buggers are linking to the BBC News print-view – presumably to avoid any navigation from appearing on the article (not sure how that benefits Sphere, it’s users or the BBC?).

Adaptive Path produced their design/front-end, which is nice but doesn’t blow me away.

In conclusion, I would say Sphere is worth keeping an eye on as they bring on new features, however I’ll stick to my existing blog search tools for the time being.

You can see an alternative, more favourable review on TechCrunch.