Sphere, a new blog search engine got launched yesterday. With 19m blogs out there and growing it’s a valuable niche. On first appearances, its got a good design and cool URL but lets face it - they aren’t the first in this arena. What makes them different?

Well they are trying to rank with reference to authority, i.e. they give authority to a blog post about mobile phones if their site is linked to from other mobile phone themed sites. The idea being that blogs inside each industry frequently reference each other and their links (or votes) will push the cream to the top of the Sphere results.

I can’t say that was too apparent on my first attempt. As with most search applications, ‘porn’ as a keyword features very highly on the most searched list.

Well I thought I better check that one, just to see the amount of spam you understand…Surprisingly enough though that brought me a list of 88857 results with the SEObook post “Passion and Pornography” in the No.1 position (screenshot). Huh small world eh?

Now I very much doubt Aaron has enough links in the world of pornography to make his posts an authority on the topic, so I’m not entirely sold on their engine. Still it’s early days for them so I’ll go back and check again in a week or two.

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