Spring cleaning at blog search site Technorati has yielded an updated interface and a more intuitive way to search for blog content.
Just as David Sifry has changed from calling it the blogosphere to the Live Web, his Technorati has published some alterations too. For one thing, search is simply that.
“In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site,” Sifry said on the Technorati blog. “No more.”
A search will now deliver all the possible social media results Technorati can find for a query. Blog posts, videos, images, and podcasts are all in play when doing a search. Sifry credited tagging for driving this change:
This is being facilitated by the phenomenon of tags and tagging, which helps to unify and organize the rapidly expanding world of user-generated media. As more and more publishing tools support the use of tags, the better we are able to assemble collections of social media based on the interests of our users.
Pure blog search has not been abandoned. People who only want blog post results for a search, without the extra “bells and whistles” of multimedia in their results, can get them at s.technorati.com. That pulls up a search page with the bare necessities: search box, language options, and choice of blog authority.
The speed of the blog-only search will be a joy for people who have long complained that Technorati had become bogged down over time. It’s screaming fast now.
Sifry also promised that more updates and innovations would be forthcoming this year. The site has experienced substantial traffic growth, with people demanding all kinds of results. If they can pull off those future changes with the same skill as they did with speeding up search, we will be very eager to see what’s coming next.
