Technorati Redesign Lays Foundation for Social Search
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 23, 2007 | Share This
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The past April, David Sifry announced that the “blogosphere” was no longer a relevant term for the conversations taking place online. He wrote, “Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.” And so, Technorati began referring to its index as the “Live Web”. Though the new terminology at first seemed trivial, the significance of these words is finally evident in the complete re-structuring of Technorati.com that launched this morning.
Technorati has officially transitioned into a search portal for all user-generated content. They’ve changed their back and front end architecture to encompass, “the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.” In doing so, they’ve not only cleaned up the site, they’ve made it tremendously more useful - a fact evidenced by overwhelming positive initial feedback.
Most interestingly, the change was driven by the growth of tagged media. Writes Sifry, “This is being facilitated by the phenomenon of tags and tagging, which helps to unify and organize the rapidly expanding world of user-generated media. As more and more publishing tools support the use of tags, the better we are able to assemble collections of social media based on the interests of our users.” When tagging was first introduced in 2005, the size of Technorati’s tagged index went from zero to 20 million posts in just 6 months. Today, tagging is a pervasive categorization system used on all types of user-generated media - In February, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 28% of all internet users have tagged online content. As tagging becomes the standard of semantic organization across user-generated content, search will have to adjust accordingly. Could we see engines based on user-generated rankings, like Wikia, prevail over the algorithms of Google, Yahoo and MSN?
The other important element of Technorati’s redesign is its emphasis on popular content. Nearly every part of Technorati’s new navigation structure helps people find archived content based on it’s popularity - beyond the search box, users browse by tag, content type, “Top” categories, or WTF. By using popularity ranking and tags as the only elements of its navigation (beyond search), Technorati underscores the importance of offering social filters to help sort content online.
In sum, I think Technorati has approached the “live web” in a really interesting and amorphous way. I appreciate that they recognize different media types within the same “social” space, and admire the execution of Technorati’s new UI. I wonder what effect, if any, this will have on the use of Technorati as an alternate search engine, and the subsequent traffic increase to blogs that are well indexed within Technorati. I wonder how this will change social media marketing strategies, specifically those that submit content to sites that are included in Technorati’s index (like Youtube, Eventful, last.fm, etc). It seems like there’s a big opportunity here to create dynamic cross-media tagging campaigns to promote your site’s visibility in Technorati results. On that note, I wonder how Technorati will deal with marketers trying to game the system - and I wonder (skeptically) if they’ll ever really have a spam-free index.
Topics: SEO, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Tagging |