You may have read about Sphere last year in John Battelle’s Searchblog.
An update was posted yesterday on Siliconbeat, one of our favorite technology blogs.
Read their posts for the insiders’ views–they were allowed to play with the beta version. To hear it from creator Tony Conrad’s lips listen to the podcast here. The best 28 minutes you can spend learning about blog search.
Sphere’s scheduled launch for today has been delayed (don’t we know about these things 
But here’s a summary:
Sphere claims that blog search is still in the Page Rank Google era — the current blog search engines basically just count incoming links. Sphere questions whether inbound link counting conveys authority or influence (popularity?).
Sphere seeks to enhance search to determine Most Relevant Posts using an algorithym that evaluates several factors–in essence create a “sphere of authority”. There are checks and balances so no factor can override another.
One is link structure quality. it is not only the number of inbound links but from whom. Is mainstream media or recognized experts linking to you? (why are they and who took the vote). If Om Malik links to you, you must be something special (we think so) & you get more points.
They also look at post length to give lesser value to blog aggregators & spam blogs (they will still be ranked however). Long posts tend to convey more useful content.
The ‘secret sauce” is what they call “content symantic analysis“. Some brain (read machine) looks at word patterns used in the posts.
An interesting feature will be the time frame parameter who can adjust to pull time sensitive posts. The goal is to get you back to 2003. I guess pre-2003 posts are destined to be forever lost to archive oblivion.
Best of luck to Sphere.
