We've been making a lot of updates and tweaks to our backend, as described at the beginning of the month. Most of these changes have been around speed and performance, and I hope that you've noticed the difference. We've also been listening to a lot of your feedback and comments. There's still a lot more to do, and we will continue to improve site functionality and speed.
For URL search, we've been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we've made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.
The change affects how Technorati ranks its over 18.5 million blogs. Our new link counts expose more active blogs and rising stars, allowing readers to discover blogs currently receiving the attention of the blogosphere.
Michael Barnett (interdictor), a blogger who actively covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is an example of an emerging
blog of interest in the past few months. Interdictor is currently the 90th most uniquely cited blog tracked by Technorati.
How things work
Technorati determines a blog's ranking based on the number of links from unique blogs over the last 6 months. If John links to Susie 5 times in 5 months Technorati will count 5 new links to Susie from 1 unique source. Susie's rank will change based on this 1 new source.
We hope you find this change a useful metric for the discovery and evaluation of blogs. We continue to store all blog links over the history of Technorati -- almost 3 years! -- and we will continue to evaluate best practices for determining the authority of a weblog. A complete list of links to a blog is still available through our URL search results.
What do you think of the changes? Spotted a bug or inconsistency? Send us a note and let us know how we may be of service. Our staff continues to work night and day to create the most accurate and useful service for you. Some of the best ideas and improvements of the Technorati service have come from you, our community of users. We'll keep the light on for you. :)
