I didn’t learn of this until I happened to post something with just the right tags. Then suddenly I started getting dozens of referrals from MSNBC’s Newsweek section.
The online versions of Newsweek and the Washington Post now show related Technorati results in a sidebar. This should help Technorati stand up against the advent of Google’s blog search.
And Technorati may need that help. Lately I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers gaming Technorati’s system. They add whatever tags appear in the top ten of Technorati’s listings in order to increase their traffic, even if their post has nothing to do with that topic. For example, if you search for “Burger King Commercial,” the phrase listed at this moment as the top search on Technorati, about half the results are at best tangential to the commercial itself. Google’s done a good job of weeding out such search engine abuse from normal web pages, and indeed, when I search for “Burger King Commercial” in its blog search engine I seem to get more relevant results. If that’s a trend, Google might draw off quite a few Technorati users.