Content Matters

Blog search engine Technorati relaunched over the weekend.

Until now, Technorati's position has been as a search engine for blogs.  They have done a fairly good job, but it was a position that could not be sustained over time with competition from Google.  In this new incarnation, Technorati is trying to position themselves as a search engine for user generated media, including video, podcasts, photos and more.  You can read the details on founder Dave Sifry's blog.

In theory, that expansion makes sense.  In practice, I'm not so sure that they pull it off.  In the past, I'd enter a search on Technorati and get an easy to navigate set of results.  Their "authority rankings" made it easy to winnow the blog post results to those from credible (or at least highly linked) sources.

The new interface, while visually more appealing, is difficult to navigate.  There are a confusing set of choices.  Do I want to look at blog posts, video, photos or audio?  And when I drill down into blog posts, while I can see their authority ranking, there no longer seems to be a way to filter by it.  That was one of the biggest differentiators they had.  Thankfully, they've moved the legacy blog search to a new location at search.technorati.com.

In the long run, this may be a good move for Technorati.  It probably makes them more attractive to a potential suitor and gives them a chance to sit at the user-generated video table.  From the end-user perspective, I'm not sure that it's an advantage.  Specialized search engines are useful because they are specialized.  In amalgamating different types of content, I think they subtract from the value they offer.