OR EMAILTechnorati Redesign: Cool But I Hope They Fixed The Bugs
The New Technorati
I mentioned Technorati was messing with their site earlier, but it seems they had much more in store. The new site (which just went live) looks totally different, keeping with the trend of removing confusing crap and focusing on what users want.
In a move to attract more mainstream users, videos are first, blogs second, and music third, with big, friendly images to click on. Stats are still there but smaller.
Essentially, while Technorati is still indexing blogs, it’s using them as a basis to determine what’s popular, and putting that information at the forefront. Meaning, “find the most popular video” is surely more appealing to mainstream users than “find the most popular video according to bloggers.” (who cares about the bloggers). It’s a small change but the emphasis is on the information, not where it came from. Hence the new tagline: “Zillions of photos, videos, blogs and more… some of them have to be good.” Previously, it was just zillions of blogs, right?
But they haven’t forgotten the geeks. The bonus (and likely what makes Robert Scoble consider Technorati as beating Google) - a fast, basic, blog search page. It’s for us that don’t care about all the repositioning, mainstream audience (acquisition) tempting stuff, and just want to search blogs fast and filter by authority.
Of course I tried a side by side comparison: a search for StarCraft 2 on Google Blog Search and the Technorati Search. Technorati claims to be faster (0.144 seconds vs Google’s 0.75 seconds) plus had more entries from under an hour ago. I do wish Technorati would add the time filters as with Google (1 day ago, a week ago). The authority filter is really where Technorati has an advantage as you can quickly filter out all the low-authority MySpace blogs.
But while I applaud all these changes, over the past year of using Technorati, I have noticed a fair number of technical problems lurking under the hood that I hope they’ve fixed with this iteration:
- The Technorati Monster regularly escaping.
- Authority changing from page to page.
- Technorati not indexing blogs properly or in a timely manner.
- The deep dark secret that a lot of the blogs being indexed are splogs and therefore completely pointless in measuring authority (popularity, yes, authority, no).
At best these are minor annoyances, but at worst they can drive a passionate blogger / user away (case in point: Mr. Engtech has a good list of grievances). I guess in the days to come with regular use we’ll see if any of these issues have been addressed. But based on the speed of the new Technorati Search, I’m hopeful.
Additional Reading: TechCrunch, Paris Lemon, Steve Rubel, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Online Media Cultist, Neville Hobson, Binary Bonsai
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so you're completely board of software in general? Tech? What aspect are you bored of? What do you like..what don't you like? -
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