Can Technorati's makeover return it to prominence?

Technorati used to be the pinnacle of blog search, an essential tool for every blogger, journalist, and news junkie. The service has since fallen from grace as replacements, such as Google Blog Search, have surfaced. Now, Technorati is completely revamping its site and service for what seems like the hundredth time. This time around, it is making major changes to its famous Top 100/Technorati Authority, as well as improving its search and blog directory. Technorati will also allow bloggers to publish their content directly on Technorati.com, creating a wealth of original content.

The home page of Technorati's re-vamped site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

One of Technorati's core features has been authority. Technorati uses authority to rank blogs into the top 100 and to give feedback about how reliable a source is. In this re-launch, authority rankings will change more quickly to accommodate for the fast-paced nature of blogs. They have also added "topical authority," which ranks blogs in categories which they cover.

Technorati also stresses that it has made significant changes to its search algorithm. In the past, Technorati's search delivered the most recent results as opposed to the best results. Now, Technorati will try to fetch you the best results, based on several factors, including authority. Its improved blog directly also now allows for better sorting by category, showing the top blogs and the biggest movers for each one.

Technorati's new Top 100.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

Finally, Technorati will begin to offer original content from bloggers who want their content to be published on the site. This is definitely a win-win situation for bloggers and for Technorati. Technorati gets a lot of good, fresh content and bloggers can hope to gain more exposure. If you're interested in this program, you can sign up here.

This is, overall, a very strong update for Technorati as it works to return to prominence. Technorati will almost certainly see a short-term jump in usage from this major revamp, but whether users will stick around remains to be seen.

[paramendra]

This is a Technorati relaunch. I think it will work.

[arghargh]

Go check out their customers reactions:

Here - http://technorati.com/blogging/article/welcome-to-the-new-technorati/

And here - http://getsatisfaction.com/technorati

Total disaster. Apparently they don't do software testing or focus groups.

If they don't move fast to fix things, someone will fill the void.

[gagahput3ra]

Not enough. The overall design and its color schemes are still boring, and not a single real innovation on feature.

The technorati story always reminds me of old (dead) search engines that before google are the king of search engine world for some reason.

[benk26]

Only the top blogs will be happy. They cut down from over 100 million blogs to 800,000 leaving out and pissing off millions of bloggers who now have no authority score and their blog posts don't show up in the search results anymore.

http://eok.net/what-happened-to-technorati

Technorati doesn't care about the people, why should the people care about Technorati?

Also, Technorati Japan closes.