December 19, 2005
Making Technorati easier to use
We just rolled out a whole raft of improvements and tweaks that are built to make Technorati easier to use and easier to understand. A few things that we rolled out:
1) Charts. Get live, updated charts on what people are saying about stuff you care about, like this, which shows a chart of the mentions of "King Kong":
2) Improved extracts. We've worked hard to make the information in the extract that we present to you much more understandable, so that you'll be able to make a better choice before clicking through to get to the source post. Here's an extract from a vanity search:
3) Scoped Search based on related tags. You can now scope a search to better understand what a community of people are saying about a subject, all in a tabbed format right below the search box, as shown below:
4) Enhanced profile information. We've put up more information about your blogs, and if you're a tag user, you can even get a map of the most popular tags you use in your blog posts. Simply click on the Author's name in search results, and you'll get taken to his or her profile page. Here's mine, along with a snippet of the tag cloud:
5) Lots more. Including a new Blog Finder widget to help you find out who is blogging about the topics that you're interested in (don't forget to claim your blog and add your tags, including your name!), revisions to the Popular widget, and a new tag widget, all down the left-hand side of search results, and lots of other tweaks.
These changes came after weeks of user feedback studies, learning by watching users and what they wanted and did on the site, and lots of tuning and tweaking of the infrastructure. We're looking for your feedback and comments on the changes! Did we do a good job? Are things easier to use? Is your favorite vanity search more understandable? Does it have more data? What else do you want?
Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogsearch, charts, feedback, launch, profile, scaling, search, serp, tags, technorati, thanks, weblog
Posted by dsifry at December 19, 2005 8:48 PM | TrackBack | View blog reactionsDave, very cool!
Bug, though. Putting Microsoft in reveals no mentions. I think that something went a little nuts. Maybe too many Xbox reviews? Heheh.
Posted by: Robert Scoble at December 19, 2005 9:26 PMRobert, you probably hit a minor glitch, sometimes this happens when you catch us during an index switchover. Just hit reload and everything usually works again.
Thanks for the feedback!
Dave
Posted by: David Sifry at December 19, 2005 9:43 PMGreat Stuff, Dave...looking forward to trying these out...your guys should now take the year off :)
best...
Posted by: Michael Parekh at December 20, 2005 6:56 AMAwesome, all these changes look like they'll make a big difference to the way I use technorati.
Posted by: alfie at December 20, 2005 8:58 AMVery cool. The search charts are a great idea!
Posted by: Neil at December 20, 2005 10:31 AMYes indeed. Leaving this thing alone for a bit and working on getting out the glitches rather than piling more on might actually boost its dependability. Still, I realize that a company has to be seen to be doing something every now and again.
Posted by: vanderleun at December 20, 2005 1:15 PMcongrats, dave.
Posted by: susan mernit at December 20, 2005 3:38 PMGreat, more features to keep from doing my work. I don't mind, but don't tell my supervisor.
Posted by: Richard at December 20, 2005 4:26 PMgreat but... what about updating the technorati rank? I mean, it's months that my blog is told to get 32 income links while in the meantime many were added or dropped, and surely the figure it's that anymore...
Posted by: anonymous at December 21, 2005 2:24 AMNice features. Technorati is more useful now.
Posted by: Kashif at December 22, 2005 3:14 AMYou removed something that now makes the site much, much less usable than before: the number of links to a site. If I'm looking for something I generally ignore sites that don't have at least one or so links to them, and that also helps me filter out splogs.
I'm also surprised that you don't have an option to filter sites by technorati rank. Such as a popup menu showing only sites with more than 5, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 links.
That shouldn't be difficult at all, and it will probably even reduce the demands on your servers. And, since the technorati rank is a slow-changing figure that could probably be computed once per day and the cached version could be used in searches.
Posted by: TLB at December 26, 2005 3:46 PMThanks for the upgrades & the new tools... I have modified an existing tag-maker bookmarklet to add a Technorati username. The bookmarklet now generates technorati tags, with the rel=tag attribute, but with an additional modifier in the URL (?user=username) to pull search results only from your claimed blogs. That way Technorati tag search results can substitute for categories on a claimed blog.
Posted by: John at December 28, 2005 4:14 PMI hate to be a whiner, but could you tell me why over 2 hours after posting the link in my name, my post still hasn't shown up when I search for the URL to the WaPo editorial I discuss in that post?
Note that my post shows up when I search for "Bad Border Bill", but not to the WaPo link. MT pinged, and when it didn't show up later I pinged using both my main URL and the URL of the post itself.
I've had this happen before too.
Is it that you index the text first, then work on the links? Or, is it some quirk in my posts that makes you miss the links?
Posted by: TheURLinquestion at December 29, 2005 1:07 PM
