Sifry's Alerts

Technorati site redesign and features launched!

The folks on the Technorati team have been working really hard on a number of fixes, improvements, new features, and UI simplifications and tweaks that we've just rolled out.

The most significant improvements:

1. Redesigned home page: Simpler = easier to understand (we hope!)
2. Redesigned and reimplemented keyword search using an entirely revised backend and frontend:
   1. Much faster indexing: most posts are available minutes after creation
   2. Redone search results page we hope that this is more intuitive, and less cluttered.
   3. Better Metadata: Significantly improved permalink detection, as well as post titles.
   4. More data indexed: We currently index posts that are up to about a month old, and we're going further and further back in our post archives every day, with the goal being to have almost 2 years of posts indexed soon.
   5. A new advanced search query language, chock full of new capabilities, including AND, NOT, OR, phrases in quotes, parentheses for word or phrase grouping, date ranges, and more.
   6. Faster results, and a more scalable backend: Query speed is improved, but we're still working on our goal: making every query come back in under a second. Not there yet, but we're doing everything in our power to get there.
   7. There's still some bugs in the code, namely some occasions when a single post shows up multiple times in search results. We're working hard on fixing this.
3. Enhancements to Cosmos searches:
   1. Redone search results page: making search results from keyword and cosmos queries look almost the same, and better display of member photos
   2. Better post and blogroll detection
   3. Speed improvements although we're working hard to continue to improve here as well.
4. Our Thanksgiving developer's contest we're having a contest to thank our developers and to showcase some of their great code, and we're giving away a new Mac Powerbook and a bunch of iSights (or equivalent gift certificates) for great new apps that use or integrate our APIs
5. Some new features still in testing: but we wanted you to see these alpha features:
   1. Technorati Top 20 MP3s - MP3s on the web that are getting links from bloggers, updated hourly.
   2. The Technorati Top 20 MP3 Podcast feed, ready for your favorite podcast reader.
6. A number of fixes and improvements to our members area, making it easier to create and manage watchlists, claim blogs, sign up for the developer program, and more.

So here's the deal: We're looking for feedback, suggestions, criticism, and comments. Top of mind for the team is how we can be of service to you, to bloggers, and to folks who care about this user-generated content. We made so many of these changes and improvements because of you - your suggestions were incredibly useful to us.

Thanks again for all your support in the past, I hope that we can continue to be of service to you. Posted by dsifry at November 5, 2004 6:15 PM | TrackBack | View blog reactions