A colleague of mine pointed me towards Sphere; a fast, new blog search engine. The interface is simple and uncluttered, making it easy to perform searches and track trends. After entering a search term and selecting “custom range” from the first drop-down, a graph of mentions appears just above the results. Click on one of the bars and you can see all of the posts from that day. Move the sliders and you can pick a custom date range.

Additionally, you can see featured blogs for your search term. You can suggest a blog for a certain topic by clicking the “Suggest a Blogger” link, which results in a handy AJAX box making it easy for you to quickly enter subsequent URLs without waiting for the page to reload. Clicking “Related Media” results in a page showing photos, news articles, books, and podcasts related to the search term. Looks very promising.