Sphere (website)

Last updated

Sphere was a blog search engine. The Sphere search engine delivered blog posts based on algorithms that combine semantic matching with authority factors to deliver results relevant to the search query.

Sphere also organized bloggers by topic.

The company produced an application called Sphere It! allowing users to seek blog posts related to news articles based on the contents of a particular web page they're viewing. The function was accessed from a browser navigation bar plug-in. Upon clicking the plug-in button, a semantic analysis was performed on the text within the page and blog posts related to the text of the article were returned. The search engine required that JavaScript is turned on in the visitor's browser.

Sphere had a variety of content distribution venues among major publishers where blog results from Sphere were presented, contextually, within news stories or other content.

Sphere was founded by Tony Conrad, CEO, Martin Remy, CTO, Steve Nieker, CIO and Toni Schneider, Advisor. The company was based in San Francisco, CA.

In April, 2008, Sphere was acquired by AOL to be operated as a wholly owned subsidiary. [1]

In 2010, Sphere was merged into AOL News.

See also

Related Research Articles

Google Search Search engine from Google

Google Search, is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world.

HTML Hypertext Markup Language

The HyperText Markup Language, or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.

Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. Netscape created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

World Wide Web System of interlinked hypertext documents accessed over the Internet

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hyperlinks, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the Web are transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser, and are published by a software application called a web server. The World Wide Web is built on top of the Internet, which pre-dated the Web by over two decades.

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating markup then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information ; often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering. In Q1 2014, Google earned US$3.4 billion, or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. AdSense is a participant in the AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This program also operates on HTTP cookies. In 2021, over 38.3 million websites use AdSense.

Netscape Browser Internet browser

Netscape Browser is the eighth major release of the Netscape series of web browsers, now all discontinued. It was published by AOL, but developed by Mercurial Communications, and originally released for Windows on May 19, 2005.

Yahoo! Search is an Internet search service provided by the American website Yahoo!. Since 2009, it uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to display web search results.

Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data. They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary. Microformats emerged around 2005 and were predominantly designed for use by search engines, web syndication and aggregators such as RSS.

Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. The web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

A video search engine is a web-based search engine which crawls the web for video content. Some video search engines parse externally hosted content while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers. Some engines also allow users to search by video format type and by length of the clip. The video search results are usually accompanied by a thumbnail view of the video.

Web content Content encountered as part of the user experience on websites

Web content is the textual, visual, or aural content that is encountered as part of the user experience on websites. It may include—among other things—text, images, sounds, videos, and animations.

Progressive enhancement Web design strategy putting emphasis web content first

Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, whilst users with additional browser features or faster Internet access receive the enhanced version instead. Additionally, it speeds up loading and facilitates crawling by web search engines, as pages' text is loaded immediately through the HTML source code rather than having to wait for JavaScript to initiate and load the content subsequently.

Microsoft Bing Web search engine from Microsoft

Microsoft Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image and map search products. It is developed using ASP.NET.

Convera was formed in December 2000 by the merger of Intel's Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation. Until 2007, Convera's primary focus was the enterprise search market through its flagship product, RetrievalWare, which is widely used within the secure government sector in the United States, UK, Canada and a number of other countries. Convera sold its enterprise search business to FAST Search & Transfer in August 2007 for $23 million, at which point RetrievalWare was officially retired. Microsoft Corporation continues to maintain RetrievalWare for its existing customer base.

PolyCola, previously known as GahooYoogle, is a metasearch engine which was created by Arbel Hakopian.

Facebook Graph Search Semantic search engine by Facebook

Facebook Graph Search was a semantic search engine that was introduced by Facebook in March 2013. It was designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The name refers to the social graph nature of Facebook, which maps the relationships among users. The Graph Search feature combined the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user's network of friends. Additional results were provided by Microsoft's Bing search engine. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. After being made less publicly visible starting December 2014, the original Graph Search was almost entirely deprecated in June 2019.

NTENT is a semantic search and natural language understanding technology company based in New York City. It was founded in 2010 as the result of a merger between Convera Corporation and Firstlight ERA. It offers a search platform that transforms structured and unstructured data into relevant and actionable insights and to predict and deliver relevant text, image, and video content experiences based on user intent and personal preferences via text or voice.

References

  1. Schachter, Ken. "AOL Buys Sphere". Archived from the original on 2008-12-01. Retrieved 2008-09-18.