Use The Technorati Percolator to Discover The Real Time Web
Posted by Ian Kallen on December 4, 2007
Those who have been following Technorati over the years may remember the basic proposition emblazoned on the web site, What's Happening on the Web Right Now. One of the exciting things about working at Technorati (particularly if you're a data geek like me) is that the web is changing in real time. Searching it in real time and discovering the significant happenings realizes the promise of the web to catalyze and connect us. While blog search continues to be a core focus of what we offer, today we're releasing discovery features that have been tooled up to bring you the Technorati Percolator.
Search & Discover
Our search application surfaces keyword, tag and link query results as they unfold. Our discovery features will tell you what's going on, not requiring that you know what to ask. In the 1.5M blog posts passing through our turnstiles everyday, some of them have to be good and we want to help you find them.
The Technorati Percolator combs the sea of posts and other media flowing through our systems to find the ones that are emerging as significant at any given time. Finding the needles in a fast-moving haystack and organizing them into topical groupings isn't easy. Items in the Percolator are sampled from our update stream, primarily ranked by the age of the item, the authority of its source, the authority of the referring blogs and the density of recent links to it. We found that by taking all of these factors into account, an effective algorithmic filter and magnifier emerges. A lot of great applications have already appeared on the landscape that try to solve this kind of problem. From what we can tell, those applications started with a small corpus of blogs and grew their coverage from there. Technorati has come at the problem from the perspective of starting with broad coverage, sampling it and winnowing it down to the good conversations. Of course, if you want to explore the social connectivity, Technorati's search systems are there to help.
Our primary goal with the Percolator is to highlight the significant things grabbing the blogosphere's attention regardless of the blogger's "A-list" or "Z-list" status. Our broader coverage should enable us to better serve the broader blogosphere. Yes, we have stories and sources from the main stream press as well as the "A list" bloggers we're all familiar with but we're also striving to provide more comprehensive coverage by going deeper into our data set than "page one". By exploiting our broader coverage, we're seeking to move meme-emergence applications further along the long tail.
While we're very proud of this release, the Percolator is a work in progress, so please keep your feedback coming. We're going to continue iterating on our technologies to better serve the blogosphere and help those navigating it search and discover what's happening.
