Good Morning Silicon Valley

Just a week ago, we were talking about Google’s move to universal search and how improved search technology was increasingly obviating the need for navigation by category (see “We find better results for ‘needle’ when we start with one big haystack“). Today, we have a fresh example. Technorati, which normally would be described inside these commas as a blog search site, is now something more.

As explained by head man Dave Sifry, beyond blogs there’s a whole universe of user-created content out there — video, photos, podcasts, music, games, etc. — and between blog links and user tags, Technorati is now able to track and present topics across the whole range. “We’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati,” Sifry writes. “In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and we’ll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web.” And, taking the pulse of the same vein as Google’s new Hot Trends (see “All the voices … too much … make them stop“), Technorati will also do more in the way of monitoring passing interests in real time, starting with a hot-topic ticker across its home page. One other smart move — a stripped-down search interface for power users who just want to get in and out.

So Technorati blows up the silos and goes from blog search to social media search. But wait a second — isn’t social media search just a bigger silo? And in the face of Google’s overarching command of almost all the world’s information, from the dry land of the static Web to the flowing real-time river, will there be a place for even big silos? Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion doubts it. “While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. … The big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you’re seeking. It won’t care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting. In short, this means the heyday of dedicated ‘live web’ search engines like Technorati is coming to a close. Technorati’s best bet going forward is to hook its technology into engines that can scan the archived web. That’s where the world is going and what searchers want.”