Technorati Overhaul
A couple of weeks ago, I made a list of six ways to improve information gathering with Technorati. The service has since undergone an overhaul, greatly improving search results (at least from my own subject tests), while further improving ways to collect and filter information.
One of the features I like is the list of popular YouTube videos. YouTube has its own popular list, but I find the Technorati list to be a more meaningful test of what's popular. YouTube bases popularity on sheer number of views. Technorati bases popularity on how many people are linking to a particular video, which doesn't weed out all the garbage, but does provide a much needed filter.
Search integration is finally a reality. Results on Technorati now combine text, photos, audio and video so that all relevant results are returned, instead of needing to search in the photo search to get photo results or the blog search to get text results.
While all the search engines are in a constant battle with spam, Technorati seems to be doing a good job keeping out the junk. It's getting harder to game the Technorati search results. Ask.com still gets a slight edge with their blog and feed search results, which are based in part on subscriptions via Bloglines. One place there's still room for improvement is speed of updates. There are a number of items in my RSS subscriptions that do not show up in Technorati search results, even though they will eventually be there. I'm not going to claim Technorati is beating Google, but they've come a long way.
For more details on new features, check out Dave Sifry's comments at Technorati.