Sifry's Alerts

New Technorati Public Beta - Go bang on it!

I'm pleased to announce the launch of the public beta of this major redesign of the Technorati service. We've been listening to your feedback, and we hope we've reflected that in this release. We've made a big step with this release. Having said that, we also know we have more improvements to make and we're working hard to implement them. Here are some of the highlights of this beta release:

• We've improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We've tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we're different from other search engines.
• We've learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
• We now have more powerful advanced search features. You can now click the "Options" link beside any search box for power searching options.
• We've added more personalization. Sign in, and you'll see your current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
• New Watchlist capabilities have been added. For example, you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. Now you can view all of your favorite searches on one page. Of course, you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!

As I mentioned, this beta is now public and available on our Web site at http://beta.technorati.com. I encourage you to check it out and, if you'd like, blog about it.

Please remember, this is a beta. While we're proud of the improvements we've made, we know we're not totally there. Our response time is not where we want it to be, so you may still experience some slow search responses. Likewise, sorting by authority still still has some hiccups. We know this and we're working very hard to fix this. We're working on issues like spam and weeding duplicates from results.

The good news for all of us is that blogging has taken off, and we all benefit from new eyes reading what we write. The pace is staggering: we are tracking somewhere between 800,000 and 900,000 new posts made each day, over 40,000 new weblogs created every day. A year ago, we were growing by a gigabyte a day. Now, we're growing by a half a terabyte a day. So half the battle is just keeping up with all this explosive growth, and I apologise in advance for when we stumble.

Please keep sending us your feedback! It is invaluable, and has helped us immeasurably to improve the service. There's still a long way to go, and we have lots more in store for the next few months - and your comments to feedback@technorati.com are the first emails we all check every morning. Please keep us on our toes, and keep telling us how we can continue to improve and be of service to you.

Technorati Tags: beta, blogosphere, givingthanks, gratutude, launch, statistics, stats, tags, technorati, thanks, weblog, weblogs