What I Like About Technorati
To a blogger, Google is an essential tool for finding images and researching (to use the term very loosely) information online. However, Google tends to be a bit dumb when it comes to the blogosphere. Google doesn’t know the difference between a regular website and a blog and other things like Wikipedia when it comes to looking for information.
Sure, there are differences, and the way that blogs and other sites publish information would have an affect on ranking in SERPs. But when you’re talking about the blogosphere, you’re looking for conversations. And when it comes to conversations, humans are the best judges of how relevant something is.
Here’s where I think Technorati excels. Technorati tracks blogs not just by machine-selected keywords or pagerank or other super-secret algorithm. Technorati counts the stuff that matters most: what people talk about and how people talk about these things. For instance, today’s top searches say Antonella Barba is the most-searched keyword. That’s probably because either people love American Idol, or they’re interested in checking out scoops and scandals about Antonella that have recently spread around the blogosphere.
Actually I notice that Technorati’s top searches regularly feature celebrities or showbiz personalities in the top 10—about half of the top 10 will be about stars, any given time. Maybe this says something about what bloggers find interesting, huh?
Technorati is very appropriate for blogs because it organizes information the way a person would organize conversations. It doesn’t necessarily just categorize blogs by main topic and according to how many times the Google bot reads a certain keyword. It’s the bloggers who define what keywords to tag blog posts with, and not some search-engine-optimization technique. More relevant results? I would say so.
What do you think?