Sphere focuses search on time and connections

You may have noticed we have a Sphere link for every ZDNet blog post, which brings up a widget (below) that offers up related blogs posts and other articles. It's part of our ongoing effort to surface relevant related content from both inside ZDNet and from across the Web.

On the news front, last week Sphere revamped its blog search site, focusing more on the current activity on the Web, the last 24-hours or seven days, and surfacing related content to search queries from Sphere widget partners, such as the New York Times, GigaOM, Access Hollywood and TechCrunch, and other sources.  The front door of Sphere has eight topic categories (Top News, US, World, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Technology, Business), each with breaking news items and related blog posts determined by Sphere's "buzz" algorithms in the last few hours.

The front door isn't as useful compared to full-fledged topic meme trackers like TechMeme or news aggregators, such as Google News. It does provide a window into what is hot and timely, and showcase what Sphere does well in terms of text analysis and matching contextually relevant content to blogs and articles from its widget partners and other sources.

 See also: TechCrunch