I Don’t Get Technorati

I’ve been reading Scoble a lot lately and he’s so excitable about blogging and related technologies that I figured it was worth checking out some of them.  So I started playing with Technorati and so far I’m just not getting it.  It’s a far worse search engine than Google, it doesn’t pick up on changes to content particularly well, it requires people to go to a fair bit of effort to ensure that they do wind up in the index and most of it’s search results just point to stupid people ranting on their blogs (you know, like I’m doing now).

The worst part of it though is that it doesn’t seem to be subscribed to the RSS feeds which would have made sense – it searches the contents of the HTML page.  This in turn means that it picks up on syndicated content as if it were actually being referred to and some comment made about it and the most cardinal sin – the content has disappeared off the page unless you’re following it all in real time.

It seems to me that I’m much better off just searching Google with the keywords and finding things that way rather than restricting my searches to the very small list of stuff Technorati knows about.

Update: Robert Scoble responded with some interesting comments, including a link to David Sifry’s blog (knowing him he’ll have found my post through Technorati).  Tim pointed out one of his recent success stories in the comments below and David Starkoff pointed me to http://tantek.com/log/2005/01.html on IRC.  David Sifry’s blog happens to have an entry that gives a good reason for Technorati searching the contents of the page:

Second, not all people who have RSS feeds have full-text feeds. Technorati actually indexes the full content of a post, not just the partial text that is often in the RSS feed.

Pretty obvious now that I think about it.  Hopefully they’ll find a way to ignore all the extraneous links and syndicated content around the sides and focus in on the useful stuff in the middle.  Of course it would be even better if everyone made an RSS feed available with full contents (even if they have a summary feed as well) but that seems like a whole new religious war.

I also have to play some more with Feedster and PubSub since they seem to be competing in the same space.  I find PubSub’s LinkRanks to be interesting but I wish there was RSS feeds for watching changes to specific URLs and changes within the top X rated sites etc (ideally X would be up to the user).