This is by no means a review of Sphere (how much did this domain name cost them??), the new blog search engine. Have a look for yourself. It also searches mainstream news sources and claims to return clean blog results without spam. Still new, but interesting. Is it the new Technorati? I don’t know. I am so used to Technorati. It will be an uphill battle for Sphere to compete.

The Sphere guys are trying to take the ‘very simple’ approach. But I like the relative ‘clutter’ of Technorati, which seems to be reflecting the immediacy of the web.

Sphere also pretends that people know what its all about. It adopt a ‘There’s good stuff out there, Find it here.” slogan which doesn’t say much. They don’t use a ‘descriptor’ in the browser window title. There’s no explanation of what you’re looking at. My guess is that they don’t want to brand themselves too much as a ‘blog related’ site. It’s just ‘stuff’ out there..

I can’t comment much on the relevancy of search results. This needs more testing. I wasn’t too impressed with the results I got back for a search on Amman.

What I liked was the blogger’s profile you can get with a click. Here’s mine for example:

Blogging aggregators and search engines will have an extremely important role to play in the way we access information in the near future. See Karim’s post on toot recently to check out more of the contenders in the blog search scene..

Read these related posts on 360east:

• A new blog is created every second.. What about Arabia’s blogosphere?
• Steorn ‘free energy’ controversy: holding our breath for what exactly??
• Ethan Zuckerman: a true global citizen’s view on the ‘cartoon war’
• The Streon ‘free energy’ controversy continues..
• When Amman was hit, the world hit the web browser and found Jordan’s bloggers