j’s scratchpad

One of my blog readers asked me offline to explain to him what Technorati was. I think our conversation went off track and I never answered his question, so I spent some time today playing with it to try to figure out exactly what to say. Then, I began puzzling over how Technorati lists who links to whom.

See, I link a lot to Thinking While Typing, Vernica’s blog, but this blog doesn’t show up in her Technorati link cosmos. I even gave her a somewhat gratuitous link today to see if I would magically appear in her list. It didn’t work. I show up in Makeoutcity’s link cosmos and I linked to him recently.

I’m wondering two things. Does Technorati only looks for links on a blog’s main page? Until today, I don’t think Vernica’s been on my front page for a while, but Makeoutcity went up yesterday. Does Technorati only deal with links to a blog’s main page? When I link to Vernica, I usually cite a specific post. When I tried searching on the URL for a specific post, I got no results. I haven’t found documentation on the site yet that explains exactly how it works, but I’ll keep digging to see if I can find something. Maybe someone at Thursday’s blog meeting (Andrew?) will know.

Regardless, Technorati is a neat tool because it allows you to see who’s linking to certain blogs. This is handy for blog discovery–a way to find blogs you might be interested in reading–and it’s useful for learning about blogs about similar topics. It’s also one of the few, if not the only, search engines on the Web specifically for blogs. Forget results pepperred with useless Web sites. Does that help explain what makes Technorati special?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2003 at 12:36 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.