Personally, I’ve never heard about Sphere until today, after checking my traffic logs. Basically, it’s a blog search engine, just like Technorati. But it seems like Sphere really wants to provide something different, with more relevant results and be user-friendly:

From their About page:

Who needs Sphere?

Everybody, of course! In one of three flavors…

1 People interested in timely topics, who aren’t quite sure about this whole blogging hoo-ha.

2 Readers who already use blog search engines, and are sick of disappointing results and spam. Those who secretly crave a faster, more intuitive, and feature-rich experience.

3 Publishers who might like to include some really good blog content in their websites, but only if it’s really, truly good.

Sphere has some really useful features such as:

– Sort the results by time or relevance

– Customizable time frames: you can search results from the last hour only, the last 12 hours, the last day etc… or you can even set a “custom range filter”, that allows you to view the results from one single specific date or between two dates.

– A user-friendly interface

I have played with it and ran a few searches, and compared the results along with Technorati, and it does seem to be able to provide very relevant results.

One missing feature for Sphere though, is the ability to specify the language of your search, the two options are only “English” or “Other languages” while Technorati recognizes 20 languages.