Sphere Searches the Blogosphere

Sphere, the latest entrant to a competitive field of blogosphere exploration, launched with some fanfare last week. The new search engine, which has focused very tightly on offering up-to-the-minute information from the world of blogging, has received very positive reviews so far, from a number of prominent bloggers and reviewers including Chris Sherman, TechCrunch and Graywolf.

The best commentary I've seen so far, however, is from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal. What Greg focuses on is the impact of blog search on the local vertical - how blogs emphasize the information which is important to a local, geographically interested search. Greg concludes his comments saying:

What we fundamentally need to see is integration of blog content with general search results so that consumers can obtain, in one results set, the entire range of relevant information. And because of this lack of integration, blog search is definitely an area of opportunity for someone — maybe Sphere.

It's unquestionably certain that the major players in search have done relatively little with blog search. Since neither Google nor Yahoo have given any significant effort to their blog searches, there's tons of room for some more valuable work.

I'm wondering why it is that Google hasn't done more with their blog search - is there something stirring in there which just hasn't come to light? It seems like a great candidate to pull results from their blog search into Google Local or as a "vertical creep" into their main search results.

I'm sure that one challenge is associating quality geographical information with most blog posts. After all, the web is fairly inherently disassociated with specific localities. It would be very interesting to make use of some kind of meta data in blogs which created a geographic center for the site. For example, Blogger currently allows you to set your time zone. If they allowed you to set your geographical location and incorporated that information into the site meta data this would provide an immediate way of providing local data to blogs with a fairly high level of accuracy.