Sphere, the blog search engine, which launched on the 1st of May, is clearly in trouble. It has a few nice features, such as a nice little flash timescale slider, and a bookmarklet which identified blogs talking about the same thing as on a given page, not only through link analysis but through semantic text analysis.It’s obviously not getting any traction, because I just had a look at an Alexaholic traffic graph comparison with Gizbuzz [click to see full size]:

On July the 7th, both Sphere and Gizbuzz happened to have an upsurge in traffic. Since I know what traffic Gizbuzz had, I can work out the rough amount of traffic Sphere had, since Sphere had just under double the traffic of Gizbuzz (shown in blue). To simplify, I will assume Sphere had double the traffic of Gizbuzz.

Gizbuzz had 4,356 pageviews that day, so double that is 8712. That number of pageviews is  absolutely diablolical for a service which has been given high profile exposure, by blogs such as Techcrunch.

This is likely to be because of a weak algorithm. I have not used Sphere for anything other than satisfaction of occassional curiosity, and it is likely that this has been the case with many potential users.