Blog Search Engine—Technorati Beta

Visitors often reach blogs through search engines and mine is no exception. The only surprise, at least to me, was that when it comes to searches that landed someone on my blog, it seems to be about 50-50 between Google and Technorati. I was surprised by this because I use Google extensively, but I had not realized so many people use Technorati as well. I had tried Technorati a few times, but gave up because it was too slow. Then I heard about the new Technorati beta and tried it out. The beta site looks better than the old site, but the response time is mixed—I had good response over the weekend, but the site seems sluggish during the workday.

Search for a keyword or a tag at Technorati beta and you get all the recent matching blogs along with supposedly related photos from Flickr. I found the tag search results more relevant than the keyword search, probably because blog posting tags are more relevant than whatever the keyword search is picking up. The Flickr photos don't typically relate to the search results, so I don't know what value they add. Displaying the most recent blogs seems like a good idea, but I wish Technorati would also display those blogs that are considered authoritative for a keyword—the problem is figuring out the "authoritativeness" of a blog; they have to figure out some kind of ranking system and number of links alone would skew this to the top few blogs. Maybe Technorati should add a "feedback/rate this" link to each search result so that users can give feedback and then factor that (along with number of links) into calculating what users find most relevant. Overall, I think I'll continue to try Technorati along with Google and also send them my feedback for the improvements.

Tags: tags tagsonomy Technorati technorati blog rank search flickr google feedback rating beta

Comments

[Joe Wikert]

Hi Naba. I too had stopped using Technorati much (other than their "Technorati This" feature) for the reasons you mentioned. For some reason, I also stumbled across the Technorati beta this weekend and found it to be much faster and useful. I haven't played around enough with it yet, but I'm sure I'll use it more if last weekend's experience was any indication of what I can expect in the future.

[K.S. Bala Murugan]

Bharath Paper Conversion – manufacturers and exporters of paper cone, paper tube, paper core, edge protectors, composite cans, fiber drums and packaging products.