Technorati today launched a new look and feel and under the hood improvements that are designed to help searchers find what they're looking for across the live web, not just blogs. David Sifry sums up the changes over on their corporate blog. TechCrunch has more.
The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don't use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it's not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn't tell me who's an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007.
A lot has changed in the last couple of years. Web search engines are getting faster, personalized and thus more comprehensive. As Marissa Mayer indicates, searchers want the most relevant and often the most recent results. All you need to do is look at the daily Google Trends reports and it's apparent just how much timely content and news drives search. This necessitates the integration of live information with more static data.
This is exactly the approach Google is taking with the launch of their universal search algorithm. The next natural step for Google is to add RSS feeds and date sorting to their primary index. I wrote about this two years ago and still believe it is coming - especially now. Play with Google's experimental timeline view and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where this is all going.
While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you're seeking. It won't care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.
In short, this means the heyday of dedicated "live web" search engines like Technorati is coming to a close. Technorati's best bet going forward is to hook its technology into engines that can scan the archived web. That's where the world is going and what searchers want.
