If you thought that the <marquee> tag was… well… a bit 1995 then you’d be right, but that was the first thing that I noticed on the all new Technorati homepage. If you’ve not come across Technorati before, it’s basically a search engine for blogs. Unlike most search engines such as Google it has very quick indexing – blog posts typically show up within minutes as long as you “ping” them to say there’s something new on your site (this is normally done automatically for you by the blog system). It tracks links between blogs and uses this to determine the “authority” of blogs.
Technorati have been struggling to keep ahead of the sheer might of Google with their Blog Search – now with even higher visibility due to the Universal Search feature they’re rolling out – so they’ve had to adapt and that’s introduced new features and less focus on blogs. Search results and browsing the site now features video, music and photos and more non-blog sites are included in the authority ratings.
Blog search is still there though and it’s been given a dedicated interface at search.technorati.com. Despite the threat from bigger players, Technorati is still a useful service, and while it might not draw huge numbers of people to our sites, it’s very useful for tracking the “buzz” surrounding blogs and community sites.