Technorati Blog Directory Is Useful But Needs Work

Technorati launched the Blog Finder service to help users find the most popular blogs on any subject based on the number of incoming links.

For instance, one can browse a ranked list of technology blogs by visiting technorati.com/blogs/tech or technorati.com/blogs/technology. Microsoft related blogs will be listed at technorati.com/blogs/Microsoft and so on.

Recently, Technorati added more options to the Technorati Blog Finder and that includes the ability to sort listed blogs either by relevance or authority or freshness of the most recently published post.

But are these new features working ? Not in all cases.

By Relevance - Technorati probably uses the Blog Title and the Blog Domain URL to calculate relevance. If we look at the Top 10 blogs related to Google and sorted by relevance, all have the word "Google" in their titles and URI but none of these blogs are relevant. Infact, some of them are defunct or last updated months ago.

By Authority - This is the original method where Technorati uses the number of incoming links (or Technorati Rank) to determine the order. This is still the most preferred route but not without problems. For instance, the top Technorati blogs on Design are sorted in incorrect order. fadtastic, at number 8 has more incoming links than Devlounge which is at number 7.

By Freshness - Blogs are sorted based on the time when they were last updated. At the time of writing this post, the Personal category of blogs was ranking blogs updated 15 hours ago at higher position than blogs updated 6 hours ago.

Can Technorati share what factors they take into consideration while ranking blogs on relevance ? Can they change the default sorting order and base that on authority instead of relevance. That will make the Blog Finder Directory all the more useful again.