Found with the Sphere widget...

I just installed the Sphere widget for related content (related content link at the end of this post) and found this article on Yahoo! in which Vinton Cerf, the internet pioneer who is now a VP at Google, discusses how high oil prices could be a boon for the online ad market. I'm not going to discuss this idea in great length right now, although I will give credit to the argument. As I've posted before, tech companies that drive efficiency could fare well in current economic conditions.

What I would like to highlight, though, is the interesting blog search service provided by Sphere. I stumbled upon it as I was reading a related article on the BusinessWeek site.

Sphere allows you to embed a widget into your blog to offer your visitors blog posts and articles related to each of your blog posts. I installed it today with some skepticism, but the results were much better than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that Sphere could find content that is not only relevant, but also timely. This makes me very excited. (Very sad, I know.) Pointing blog visitors to very timely related content is a big improvement on typical blog search engines.

One of the great difficulties in creating any kind of search engine is indexing. Having a comprehensive collection of webpages can be very challenging, given the overwhelming size of the internet. Even further, a timely indexing of all of these pages can be even more trying. Consider Google's job of not only storing a relatively complete version of the internet, but also re-crawling those billions of pages quickly enough to identify the newest, freshest content.

Although I'm not sure how Sphere indexes, I suspect they use the widget embedded in their 86,000 and some partner sites to offer their related content. As Sphere picks up steam, I suspect that a wider range of blogs will find relevant content for their visitors via the service. (It's probably very easy to find tech-related content for my blog, but a stamp collecting blog might be out of luck for now.)

Anyway, I'm excited about the Sphere service. Let me know what you think.