Lot of things have changed at Technorati. From a simple blog search engine indexing 71 million blogs, Dave and his team have transformed Technorati into a multimedia search engine for pictures, videos, music, blog posts and current events.

The Technorati redesign is nice and refreshing but you may be missing the old features like Technorati Charts and the Blog Finder which was a directory of blogs arranged in various categories.

Well, there's little reason to get disappointed as these features very much exist inside Technorati though they are not easy to use as before.

Access the Technorati Charts as before

Technorati Charts are one of the most useful features of Technorati. They show (in near real-time) the popularity of some topic or URL in the blogosphere.

For instance, this chart on Feedburner shows blog posts / citations for the last 30 days - notice the peak yesterday due to the acquisition rumor.



Technorati Charts are unfortunately broken in the new version but you can create them manually with a bit of URL hacking.

technorati.com/chartimg/keyword?days=30&height=200&width=400

Replace the "keyword" with a search term like "Yahoo" (for finding blog posts containing Yahoo!) or yahoo.com (for citations or blog posts that linked to the Yahoo! website)

Other parameters like Days, height and width can also be modified for custom Technorati Charts.

Technorati Blog Directory (aka Blog Finder)

http://technorati.com/blogs/[topic]

Type technorati.com/blogs/Yahoo in the browser to find blogs about Yahoo! or technorati.com/blogs/blogger to see top blogs in the blogger category.

You can find blogs on particular topics using the standard Technorati search but that doesn't offer an option to sort results by freshness, authority or relevance.

Bonus Tip:Update Your Website Thumbnail Image on Technorati

Is Technorati displaying an old thumbnail of your blog ? Blame it on Alexa since Technorati uses the site thumbnail from Alexa instead of capturing them on their own.

Therefore, to update the site snapshot in Technorati, visit this site thumbnail updater on Alexa.com - type your website URL and Alexa will update the thumnail image of your site in next 48 hours. It will update automatically on Technorati.