Sphere Blog Search just went ‘officially’ live at 7 AM this morning. The new v1.5 release (after the original beta) includes following updates:
- custom range histogram;
- sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
- top queries this hour/ this week;
- RSS for search results;
- community feedback buttons throughout the site;
- expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);
- expanded related news articles coverage (over 50 mainstream news sites such as CNN, NYT, ESPN, Fox, USA Today to name a few);
- expanded profiles;
- featured blogs for 12,000+ keyword search terms covering over 500 broad topics including baseball, anime, food, web 2.0, tech news, knitting, culture, etc.;
- a brand new back end that scales.
I’ve had my beta invite since somewhere in November and I must say, it grew fast and I’m quite impressed with the end result. I think I’m going to use Sphere a lot more often. Sure there were some small problems in the beginning, but those are all gone now. You really should check this out !
Most important are the featured blogs for over 12K keywords. That’s really impressive. The other thing I like a lot is the fact you can subscribe to RSS feeds of any search result and that podcasts and other media are immediately included and linked to your search query. This is about the most complete niche search ever. If they should start a ranking system, I bet they could easily leave Technorati behind.