Technorati announced a major relaunch this morning, 6-months in the making. The new Technorati has evolved from a blog search to, as the site puts it, an "everythinging in the known universe" search. What that really boils down to is: user generated content. Technorati mainly searches blog posts, photos, and videos, but also music and events. Technorati CEO David Sifry says people are using the site to "get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more."
To that end, Technorati is now a hub for user generated content, aggregated across over "250 million videos, blogs, photos, podcasts, events, and other social media objects." A lot of these media features were already available at Technorati, and indeed much of the relaunch is about the overhauled site design and search results integration than anything else.
But Technorati has removed the emphasis on blog search and repositioned itself as a live search site, which may be a brilliant move in light of Google's recent universal search initiative. As Robert Scoble guesses, it looks like their "valuation just went up about $500 million." (Perhaps not that much, but certainly, while acquisition rumors persist, this move only makes the site a more attractive prospect for purchase. I could see Yahoo! taking a long, hard look at Technorati.)
Technorati has also eliminated their "search silos." Instead of separate searches for keywords, tags, or the blog directory, there is now one unified search that attempts to return the most relevant results. Keeping things simple always makes a lot of sense and will certainly win points from users. For purists, Technorati offers a new dedicated blog search that works more or less like it always has, though with as simpler design.
I always found Technorati to be useful. To me, their blog search seems to be a lot more "live" than Google's, finding new posts in a matter of minutes, and I often use it to research obscure subjects and see what people are saying. However, according to David Weinberger, who is on Technorati's board of advisers, the default search is now about tags -- not the actual text of blog posts. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I do know that Technorati is not indexing the full text of blog posts the way Google likely is. In order to compete in the long run, Technorati will have to find content based on the content itself -- not just how people describe it, in my opinion.
Beyond their blog search, I hope that Technorati expands their video search beyond YouTube, their photos beyond Flickr, events beyond Eventful, and hope their music search crawls more than Last.fm. Sifry says today's changes are just the beginning of a series of changes that will make Technorati results richer and more comprehensive, so hopefully that includes expanding their search pool.
"The world has changed," Sifry said on his blog. "This isn't just about blogs anymore. And to be of service to you, we have changed too."
What do you think of the changes to Technorati?
Comments
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I fear they just downgraded their service significantly... I'm having trouble finding a way to search posts instead of just tags. Yesterday I was able to do that, today I can't find it.
For example, Yesterday I could find anyone that mentioned R/RW in a post title by doing a search for "Read/Write Web". Today I only seem to be able to find posts *tagged* "Read/Write Web", which will be many, many fewer.
I could be wrong about this, but when I do an advanced search for "posts containing" words I searched yesterday, I'm not seeing the posts I found yesterday. I'm seeing only posts days older, which means either they reduced their index and lost the past few days of data, or they're not searching the posts themselves anymore.
Am I wrong?
Posted by: Dan Grossman | May 23, 2007 1:27 PM
I like the new design and it certainly seems more appealing now to non-geeks, which probably was their main priority. Their focus on tags is interesting, but I guess that is how the likes of YouTube mostly work too. Perhaps it's an indication that their text search engine is not up to par? Certainly they've had their issues with indexing in the past.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | May 23, 2007 1:29 PM
Hi Dan, my comment was same time as you. I've just checked out the site search and it *seems* ok:
http://www.technorati.com/search/http://www.readwriteweb.com
It could be just the UI changes have upset some of our previous habits. but will keep an eye on that....
Posted by: Richard MacManus | May 23, 2007 1:33 PM
Might've been a temporary glitch. Running the same search I ran half an hour ago gives me the results from the past few days it wasn't giving back earlier.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | May 23, 2007 2:07 PM
Don't particularly care for the changes, although I can see them appealing to others. For now, the blog search version is going to be what's going to get the most mileage
Posted by: Deepak | May 23, 2007 2:58 PM
I understand the desire to embrace a wider range of media types. I really don't understand why they rolled this out this way. Alienating current users so thoroughly never seems like a good strategy. It seems like they should have eased into it, adding the new media around the existing search results to give people time to adapt, and also to give themselves time to polish the new features.
Posted by: eas | May 23, 2007 4:32 PM
Wow the new looks is definitely 2.0 snazzzy. Like Borat: i like
Posted by: Sarah at Corona Web Design | May 23, 2007 6:09 PM
it seems not bad, have a try
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Posted by: josephc4mpbell | May 23, 2007 9:18 PM
I think the redesign looks better, but I dislike Technorati's "everything in the known universe" search. I use Technorati's blog search and I will continue to use their blog search, although I wish they would include it on the home page. They could also put the "evreything in the known universe" search on another page.
Posted by: Mercurie | May 23, 2007 9:21 PM
I thought I was the only one who used the term "Zillions"! The site does look much better (or fresh at least). Perhaps graphical and spatial representations are the way of the future. I like them compared to plain text. Now if we could just drag and drop our favorite Icons around it would be really interesting. :o)
Posted by: Phil Butler | May 23, 2007 10:05 PM
While the reactions to the new Technorati are mixed, the content aggregation is vastly improved and makes sense. There really is more to social media than blogs and this proves it. Pity the new designs is somewhat flawed.
Posted by: Gino Cosme | May 24, 2007 6:02 AM
like most i like the new cleaner user interface, and there's certainly nothimg wrong with increasing the market value of ones property. however that value is build on the inventory of users and this is where i see weakness in their "new" business model. both services offered and service to custoner seems to have taken a back seat String Theory and Technorati Forum Edicate covers both these points.
Posted by: sookietex | May 28, 2007 10:28 AM