Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Testing Testy Technorati

For step #14, I am looking at Technorati, a blog search website I reviewed in my post More RSS. For starters, I have created a Technorati Profile. So far, whatever I search, even starting to search this blog's URL specifically has resulted in, well, no results.

There are three ways to get Technorati to recognize a blog, so I hope I did it right. I followed the instructions, so it is a wait and see. There was probably another step (there is always another step) and I missed it.

I like Technorati, but I would like to see more descriptions as to where I am going. For instance, on the Popular page, one of the Top Blogs is listed as ?? ??? ??BLOG with 14,417 blogs linking to it--probably to find out what the heck it is.

The Discovery page isn't much better. There are too few topics here. We have five main areas with tabs for about five more in each. But, I don't see tabs for pets, cars, hockey, etc. and no place to add these.

What I do like is the results page. Here we have sections for finding results by blog, photos, video, podcast, music, and/or people.

What I don't like are tags. As I ranted--I mean, explained, in my previous post, there are too many variables with tags and Technorati proved this to be true. Using my default search phrase, Italian Greyhound, I got 13 results. However, if I searched the plural form, I get no results and it is not as if there are no tags for Italian Greyhounds. The photo search goes from 2,408 for the singular form to 194 for the plural. If the two tags were amalgamated, then I would get the same number of search results.

Another nice site hampered by these awful tags.

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