Thing 14 : The Zen of Technorati : searching the moment

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.

Thing 9: Finding needle in the vast ocean

Instead of focusing on library-related blogs or feeds, I decide to approach broader subjects to see if some of the search engines mentioned in "23 Things" and I are up to the challenge.

My first search is for "Barrack Obama". "Finding needle in the vast ocean" is exactly how I felt when more than 590,000 posts related to him came up in Bloglines. As more and more people publish in the web, how do I search? How do I pinpoint the feeds that are relevant to me? Most search engines like to show you what they have but they don't want to tell you how to find them.

Of the 5 search engines listed in “23 Things”, Bloglines, Feedster, Topix.net, Syndic8.com, and Technorati, Feedster is the only one that provides a useful “search help page” and the search tips are fairly easy to follow. In Technorati and Bloglines, I have to pore over their FAQ page only to find unsatisfactory answers. I'm unable to locate the Blogfinder mentioned in "Technorati tutorials" in "23 Things", it seems I have to sign in as a member first to have access to this feature, hopefully I will learn more about it in Thing 14 . Topix doesn't even include a “Help” button on their home page, they expect me to find my own way.

Lack of sorting tools is another major problem for me. Most search engines define search options or categories such as feeds, blogs, citations, hottest news, music, religion, etc. for us, feeds can usually be sorted by dates. However, a lot of these classifications are still too general for me to narrow the feeds down to a more manageable size.

To cut through the clutters, I've finally learnt to be very specific with my keyword search. In Feedster search box, I put in as many words, phrases, dates, and reliable sources as I can think of , as a result, I am able to reduce the 48,945 feeds on “Obama” to 3. I've also learnt if I want to find feeds for a specific news story, I can always go to the Washington Post website where many stories have a feature called “who is blogging”, it is operated by Technorati, through which I can read all the feeds that are related to a specific story.

To find local news, the best search engine is Topix.net. To start a search in Topix, I can either go to their website or to the CNN.COM homepage and look for the local news box, a zip code is all I need to find out the latest local news. Most sources come from local news media. "Ellicott City News", for example, draws the news from Baltimore Sun, Howard County Times, Columbia Flier, WBAL-AM, and WJZ-TV, etc., readers can submit their own stories too. I can also post a comment on "Ellicott City News" forum, one of many topic-driven forums offered by Topix, this is as close to a town hall meeting as you can get online.

My last search is for a popular food blog called “Chocolate & zucchini”. Syndic8.com is the only search engine that delivers. I typed in the phrase, no more, no less, Syndic8 gave me 3 entries that matched exactly what I was looking for, I didn't have to browse through thousands of unrelated feeds or blogs. However, unlike most search engines, Syndic8 does not display brief description nor source for each entry upfront on the result list, it seems people in Syndic8 really love statistics, I had to go through a couple of pages of mysterious codes and detailed statistics before I could see the actual blog or posting.

Thing 3: The Impossible does the Unthinkable...

She owns a piece of real estate on the internet by creating her own blog, something she didn't even dare to dream of a couple of weeks ago. Compared with the spread that some of her coworkers, the bloggers extraordinaire, have put together, this is a rather primitive abode and a humble beginning. She doesn't know what this is going to lead her to, she is ready to explore.