Just when you weren’t sure about the premier blog search engine Technorati anymore – the company blog bereft of Blogosphere reports, occasionally slow (or futile) search queries, no buzz anywhere – Technorati chief Dave Sifry pops online to say everything’s gravy.
Don’t hold your breath on the State of the Blogosphere report, though. The Blogosphere’s all grown up now and has changed its name to the Live Web, a post-pubescent transmogrification that includes blogs, photos, videos, music, events, and tags. Sifry’s State of the Live Web report is due out later this week.
Sifry called the growth of tagged media pages “phenomenal.”
“As the use of tags becomes more ubiquitous across all forms of social media and the publishing platforms that support them,” he said, “they’ve become the lingua franca of the Live Web – the way in which people all over the world indicate what topics or issues are top of mind and guiding self-expression.”
Business has been good for Technorati. In March, the site attracted over nine million unique visitors, a 141 percent increase over the previous quarter. Online metrics firm Hitwise recently reported that Technorati was again, after a brief slip to Google’s Blog Search, the most used blog search engine.
Google’s been a much tougher competitor in the blog search world lately, ever since the company integrated a Blog Search link with Google News.
Even that extra homepage exposure hasn’t been able out-promote the word-of-mouth cred Technorati’s been enjoying recently. Robert Scoble indicates that Technorati has been the talk of South Park – the one in San Francisco, that is.
The Scobeleizer is challenging his readers to pit the two engines against each other and share results. Early testing shows Technorati bringing back twice as many results as Google.
“It does look like Technorati has pulled ahead again in this race,” he said. “The UI on Technorati is certainly ahead of Google’s.”
Speaking of UI’s, Tantek Celik also brings our attention to three new Technorati widgets, which can be embedded on a blog or website, designed to give live information about the current top searches, top tags, and best authority (authority’s important for linking).
