searcher of blogs, Sphere gets a beta review I was recently let into the blog search site Sphere's beta to do some poking around. Right off the bat, I must say it's working pretty quick. You don't have to wait at all for Sphere to show you results from your searches. While fast is good and all, I must say the results themselves weren't as up to date or reflective of the top blogs in their categories. I did a search for "Xbox 360" in Technorati and in Sphere and the results were quite different.

The top three links Technorati returned were all to teh same site, Joystiq. Having each of the top three sites point to the same blog is a little iffy. It's not too iffy since Joystiq is a pretty big videogame blog so the fact that they showed up hints at Technorati's ability to dig out top blogs.

Sphere's results were good but not they didn't impress me as much. The first link returned was to a post about the recently announced backwards compatibility of the Xbox 360 on atypepad Xbox review blog. The blog looks nice and all but it definetly isn't the most popular video game blog (9 posts in the past 9 months?). The second link was to an Xbox 360 backwards compatibility article (dated 11/12, that's like 5 people years in the blogverse!) on respected site arstechnica. Respected as being a good all around tech site, but they're not THE video game site. The third link seemed to be the most recent, the article it pointed to was dated yesterday, but it was about the releasing of King Kong.

My overall impression, Sphere is quick but they aren't returning the most relevant data yet. IT could just be the blogs they have indexed and this will most likely change over time. Their percieved speed thus far can only help them. I'm not going to be using them exclusively or anything but hey, the kid's got potential.  ¶ 8:57 PM