According to Technorati, there are 70 million weblogs and I'm going to find out if this search engine can help me find blogs about “Learning 2.0”
There are 3 ways to search in Technorati, by blogpost, by tags, and by blog directory.
It seems it really doesn't matter which search option I use, whether it's keyword search on homepage, “their favorites” or advanced tag search, the results are almost identical, around 25,000 blogposts for “Learning 2.0”.
I'm not sure how blog directory works since there are only 20 topics listed , anyhow, I get 683 results, which is a big improvement.
The search becomes interesting when I search by tags. First I go to tag page for suggestions. Unfortunately, the tag page lists only popular tags, most of them are too broad to be useful. I'm not sure where my “Learning 2.0” fits in. “Education”? Maybe. Or should it be “Technology”?
Finding relevant results by tags has everything to do with how the blogs are tagged. Take Japanese food for an example. There are 110,458 blogposts about Japanese food, with the help of related tags such as snacks, bento box, fish, vegetarian, etc., I can narrow down my results significantly.
Unfortunately, there are no related tags available for “Learning 2.0” and thus makes the search much more difficult. So I decide to put in as many tags as I can think of using the advanced tag search option. “Learning 2.0 or 23 things” gives me 1,316 results while “Learning 2.0/23 things” gives me 5. Obviously, “or” and “/” do make a difference in results.
Sometimes I wonder if tags are the best way to search a topic, especially after reading the tag statistics from Technorati. According to them, only 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags, majority of the posts didn't. So my final verdict is that if I know exactly what I am looking for, I will do an advanced keyword search, type in the exact phrase, choose “blogs about”, and I will get a manageable size of 102 results for "Learning 2.0.
While I was navigating the site, something interesting was happening at the same time. “Learning 2.0” began to emerge on the “Top search” list and was climbing up the chart. What it really means is that right AT THIS VERY MOMENT, my coworker Regina and I happened to be searching the same topic multiple times, our collective effort put the topic on the chart. Next day, when I checked “Top search” again, my topic was no longer there. Technorati is about living the moment, searching the moment.
Searching in Technorati is a frustrating experience for me. First, the site froze a few times during my navigation. It seems to me the site handles the volume of traffic better in the morning than around 6:00 p.m.. Second, there are not enough sorting tools available to me to find relevant results. Most blogposts can either be sorted by language or by “authority”. Authority here doesn't mean quality or reliability, it means popularity, it means the number of blogs linked to a certain blogpost.
Technorati may not be my choice of search engine because of the problems cited above. However, if there's breaking news, or if I want to know what people are talking about at this very moment, whether it is politics, entertainment, or business, this is the place where I want to be. The new blogpost page is updated continuously and some of the blogposts actually come from reliable sources such as CNN.
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