I distinctly remember falling in love with Technorati the first time I played with it. Googling will find surprising little treasures, but there always seems to be so much muck and slime, soggy tires, rusted cans and broken bottles to sift through and discard when Google dredges up the information pool. If something is for sale, Google will find it sooner or later.
Undoubtedly my first experiments with Technorati also dumped out a load of superfluous debris, but in addition it came back with real people and real thoughts. It was as if Google found clumps of unprotected digital data, especially from commercial websites, but Technorati found a vibrant world of ideas. It appears I am not the only person to notice.
Technorati: A New Public Utility: If you think about it, Technorati has become a public utility on a global scale. While Google didn't invent the internet, it made it easier to navigate by organizing billions of web pages. … At its essence, Technorati may be a search engine, but its approach is vastly different. Google, for instance, views the web as the world's largest reference library, where information is static. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System, Google employs its PageRank technology, which orders search results based on relevance. Google uses words like web page, catalogs and directory, which are more than just words: They convey an entire worldview. … In contrast, Technorati sees the internet as a stream of conversations. This makes it much more immediate.Now that Technorati has added advanced search capabilities I see it rivaling Google in the search world. When Google went public one contrarian analyst cautioned about betting the farm on the inevitable dominance of their search engine. He warned that Google’s revenue stream ultimately depends on the volume of its search engine traffic, and competition almost guarantees there will be improved products in the future. America is still an innovative capitalist society on a planet filled with copycats.
This is good news for Google because the history of human advancement is the continual addition of new tools. Beginning with the thin sharp stick, round throwing rock, strong branch lever, yadda, yadda, yadda, DeWalt Cordless Rechargeable Power Drill, new tools have always complemented each other. There is more than one type of screwdriver in your toolbox. Computer science needs to keep coming up with better search engines because my irrational desire for omniscience just won’t fade away.
