June 9, 2005
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
Posted by dsifry at June 9, 2005 7:56 PM
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Half a terabyte a day!!! That's a lot. You must be plugging in new boxes every other week. Do you use an opensource search engine for your full-text-index?
(Xapian | Lucene | Odeum | etc)
From my initial skirmish, it looks totally excellent. Well done. Makes explaining it to others a whole lot easier. Thanks.
What about Searchlet? I cannot find any information about it at the new site.
It sounds terrific. The very best of fortune.
Could we have our colons back?
The beta version seems to removes colons (":") from the titles of posts. I copied quite a few other people when I started writing a blog, I use a subject word followed by ":" at the start of my post titles. They look a bit odd in the beta version compared to the original.
Great!
Just one question: what happened to the "duality of Cosmos"? I see a link count, but no "sites count" anymore...
This is good news for our Ideascape users since they'll now be able to find/discover ideas faster and easier - connect the dots to get their work done.
That's a nice, cool beta. It feels friendly. The onyl thing I would trash is the main picture on the left: stick with abstraction, avoid this type of graphics. They look more childish than anything else, at least that's how I feel about it. New bubble is wickedly sleek, besides, excellent job.
Best of luck Dave. I was pleasantly surprised by the new wording on the Technorati 100 "The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by links". It is accurate and you've removed the questionable word "authoritative".
Did you decide that authoritative is in the eyes of the beholder, after all?
very nice!
Technorati got better and better. And that is cool to see.
Half a Terrabyte a day? That is allot. Every day?
Really? With 800,000 to 900,000 new posts that would come down to 500KB of data per post.
I know some people blog allot, but 500K? ;-)
Looking at the data that I have it seems that the average blog size is around 46KB for non spam, and 135KB for spam blogs.
0.5T a day? Hard to believe.
But that is probably just me not getting it. As usual.
More imporantly: Cool that technorati is here for us and that it get's better and better.
The 1/2 terabyte figure comes from the additional data replication that we have to do in order to scale and manage the growth while maintianing performace of queries...
Dave
Your Furl links within the post are to Furl dot com instead of Furl dot NET. Thought you would like to know.
btw-- I like the beta design!
how about that first question?
"Do you use an opensource search engine for your full-text-index?"
Did you guys grow that in-house or is that something like nutch/lucene doing the job?
Many years of hard yakka are paying off Dave,
New looks, new features ... Great redesign and even better blog post announcement. It's nice to see a corporate blog providing a great public service...
Luckily, I have nothing to hide as Technorati seems to be more efficient than the Communist Big Brother or any other government tracking system.
1,938,823 weblogs watched.
256,814,496 links tracked.
WOW!
Totally snazzy. Technorati rocks!
Hmm - I was disapointed I didn't at least get a "We wrote it inhouse" reply.
I'm founder and CEO of Technorati. I was the cofounder and CTO of Sputnik and Linuxcare, founding board member of Linux International, and board member of AOTC. I've been around the block a few
times. Some might call me a serial entrepreneur. A more personal but less-updated site has more information about me - pictures, speeches, software, etc. You can contact me at david-blog@sifry.com.
