Sphere's raison d'etre is simple: “we thought we could build a much better search engine to serve the rapidly growing blogosphere”. This is a lofty goal given there is already plenty of competition (Ice Rocket, Technorati, Blogdigger, Google, etc.) that do a pretty good job. With the Sphere beta getting wider release, my first impression is it has a long way to go before it can seriously go after the established players. Its approach is straightforward: “high-quality, relevant and timely blog posts” rather than just the most recent. This makes sense if you are going to enter a crowded market but the search results are mixed. It seems somewhat odd to do a search on “Nortel and Mike Zafirovski“, for example, and gets posts that are five and six days as your first two results. Mind you, Sphere's first search result is about Nortel naming Mike Z. its new president while Technorati produces an item about Motorola winning a 3G contract in Brazil - so score one for Sphere. There are a couple features within Sphere that are particularly impressive: when you do a search, it returns relevant news in a box on the right hand side from media such as the New York Times and CNet. You also get a mini-profile of the blogs being presented. This makes it easy to get a sense about the bloggers, which is a huge improvement from Technorati, Ice Rocket, et al. While I think Sphere has potential and, unlike Flock, its beta is fairly well-baked, it seems to have many of the same characteristics as most cool Web 2.0 services: no obvious business model (it appears to be targeting publishers looking to incorporate blog search), plenty of competition and it has been able to raise some venture capital – buoyed by the fact its co-founder Tony Conrad sold Oddpost to Yahoo for a whack of dough. As venture capitalist Peter Rip has coined, we're in the midst of an “entrepeneurial bubble” where plenty of ideas are getting funded, and Sphere is a perfect example. So far, however, it does not appear that the market has become irrational. It will be interesting to see how Sphere develops but I think it needs to put a lot more focus on demonstrating that its search results are better and different from the competition. This could be a presentation issue but if it is going to be its differentiator, it definitely to be enhanced or Sphere will just be another blog search engine trying to unseat Technorati from its top, but precarious, perch.