Sphere Gets A Warm Hug From TechCrunch

I did an interview with Sphere last July, a search engine with big dreams in a world where Google dominates, but niche players have the opportunity to build real empires.

TechCrunch reports today on the quiet success of their strategy, especially that of the SphereIT! widget that allows users to bookmark links and organize the web.

But the company, led by CEO Tony Conrad, isn’t just attacking the market from a bottom up approach. They have also been closing deals with some of the biggest news sites in the U.S. Deals with The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times (Tech & Science sections), AOL News, TIME, Dow Jones Market Watch, CBS News, AOL Entertainment, NBC Access Hollywood, Media General Affiliates, AOL Sports, ZDNet Blogs, DWELL, About.com and others were all announced recently on the Sphere blog.

These news sites and 20,000 blogs all have Sphere results included on story pages - see this story on CNN for an example, or the screen shot above for the WSJ implementation. That’s well over 1 billion page views per month with Sphere links and results.

The search engine space is a crowded one, and what sruck me about talking with Tony was how they approached search.  Rather than just being about crunching data - they were about connecting people with information.  That may sound like semantics, but human beings do more than type words into search engines when we look for accuracy, and as many people have said, Google doesn't show truthful results, it shows popular results.  Check out the rest of TechCrunch's glowing reports on Sphere, and consider adding their widget to your toolbar.

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Comments

[tony conrad]

Thanks for the kind comments. We've been heads down for the past year with a focus on creating value for our partners - we've gotten a few lucky breaks and the plug-in has taken on it's own momentum.

Thanks again.