Sphere, a brand new blog search engine, has launched. The first thought which sprang to my mind was, “Another one?“. I decided to take a look and see if it would convince me to switch from using Technorati as a handy search engine on Firefox.

The site itself reminds me of how Technorati used to be: way less cluttered. I’m sorry Technorati but I’m not interested in Michelle Malkin’s favourite blogs, or whoever randomly appears on your home page. There’s just way too much text there and competing links for my attention.

Sphere keeps it simple: a search bar and popular searches - although it’s very obvious that Sphere’s userbase is still small: “how to stop a puppy from greeting and peeing” was in their top list when I went there.

Adaptive Path helped develop the site and they provide insight into the project:

There is no shortage of competition among blog search tools right now, and most of them are trying to differentiate themselves by pushing an overwhelming array of features at their users. Unfortunately, many of those features are secondary to what users are actually trying to accomplish.

Sphere… needed a compelling and straightforward interface to engage users… a user experience that allowed searchers to explore the power of the tool, yet still felt “simple.â€?… without clear ways for users to explore the tool’s capabilities, Sphere ran the risk of becoming yet another also-ran in the blog search race.

A great reminder of keeping it simple, keeping it focussed.

TechCrunch talks more about the features but one thing I am really surprised that isn’t available in their set of tools is a Firefox search engine (or one for IE).

Perhaps other people don’t use this feature as much as I do, but I love having a drop down list of the sites I use most often - Google, Amazon, Delicious, IMDB, Technorati, Wikipedia and Dictionary. I don’t have to load up their site first, just to use the search box.