Technorati's New Blog Tool
I'm a little confused about the launch of Technorati's new blog finder because I was under the impression Technorati was already a blog search engine. Apparently, the beta blog finder is different because it lets people find blogs about a specific subject rather than just blog posts. Got that? Using Google-like methodology, the most highly-linked blogs appear first on a search list. If you conduct a search for “technology”, for example, the usual suspects appear: Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc. In a sense, the blog finder addresses one of Technorati's weaknesses - the delivery of quantity rather than quality. It can be rather frustrating to do a search and then have to sift through dozens of results to find a good blog. Then again, you can stumble upon some excellent blogs that you have otherwise never have read. Tech Crunch describes the blog tool as an “interesting experiment”. I guess you have to give Technorati points for trying something new even it doesn't exactly hit the mark. As one of the pioneers in blog search, it has been subject to plenty of criticism - some of it well deserved - from folks such as Jason Kottke, who has bid farewell to Technorati, and Zoli Erdos, who suggests Technorati is an idea company that can't execute. The key for Technorati is to keep moving ahead and experiment with new services. If they work, great; if not, try something else. Technorati CEO Dave Sifry posted a progress report earlier this week. Looks like the big problem has been handling growth and addressing some key technology issues such as keyword search. One last thought before I sign off: how long before Google launches a blog search tool?
Addendum: Josh Hallet has some interesting thoughts about Technorati Blog, pointing out some of the bugs/issues that need to be addressed.
September 3rd, 2005 at 8:55 am
Mark, that's a good point about quality vs. quantity. I've always wondered why Technorati does not allow sorting of the search results by link-rank, or even filtering it by a threshold.
Of course there is the ongoing debate on just how good an indicator the number of links is… but so far that's the ranking system the Blogosphere, and esepcially Technorati has, and it's better then nothing….
But then again, had this filter been available, you'd never have found my post