Sphere acquired by AOL; when did their blog search disappear?

Sphere announced today that they've been acquired by AOL:

We think it’s a huge advantage to become part of a suite of services that understands how Internet users access/ consume content, and how to intelligently monetize in tandem with that content. This is a win-win for our partners, AOL and Sphere.

Speaking of "monetize", here's some background from their about page.

The four of us (Martin Remy; Steve Nieker; Tony Conrad; and Toni Schneider) founded Sphere in 2005. We originally built a blog search engine. We decided that wasn't very interesting.

My translation: "we decided that it was very hard to make money from a blog search engine".

Even after Sphere changed focus, their site included a search box. Did anyone notice when it was removed? Archive.org's records stop at Aug. 1, 2007.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch covers some of the history:

When Sphere first launched as a blog search engine they were already late to the blog search game. Technorati and others had been around for some time already, and even Google Blog Search was nearly eight months old. Sphere had some nice features, but it was in a tough and competitive space.

But CEO Tony Conrad, a former venture capitalist, quickly adapted to the changing market and focused on delivering blog results relevant to content delivered by big news and content sites.

Om Malik of GigaOm adds a personal note.

Here are some numbers: