Technorati, the incumbent blog search engine, has launched a new design today, as well as a number of features which reflect a change of emphasis.

The redesign itself is very nice; it’s more minimalist than any recent effort, and gives big emphasis to discovery of content, with a frankly enormous tag cloud and a selection of three videos, blogs and music albums which are deemed to be of the moment. Visually it maintains the obligatory rounded corners, so it must be a success.  The interface throughout is tidier and more effective than previously.

An interesting change (in that I don’t remember it last time I used Technorati) is in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are manfully attempting to do something fairly similar to Google’s recently announced Universal Search, in which a single search will result in the most relevant content, whatever the form. On Google this can include anything from text to images, maps to books. On Technorati this would include video content, podcasts and blog posts, for example.

Technorati is, however, less successful than Google. Their attempt revolves around a ‘featured’ tab on the search, which is far less clever than Google, because all they do is search various mediums and then plonk it in a relevant box. Video results are shown in the video box, blogs in the blog box. You get the idea. This easier to do because it doesn’t require ranking algorithm, and all it really amounts to is a metasearch of the different content-type searches. Whilst a nice UI touch, it isn’t really much more than that. They continue to push using Technorati tags; if you want to show up on that ‘featured’ page, my initial look would suggest that you must use them.

So what’s that change in emphasis that I mentioned then? CEO Dave Sifry alludes to it in his post on the Technorati blog:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.

I think what he’s talking about (the emergence of many different forms of new media) only really scratches the surface of what Technorati is becoming, or could become. I’ve talked before about the problems of content discoverability in the long tail (explanation of what that means), and Technorati is well placed to provide a completely different solution to the problem from what’s being done by the current leaders in the area (Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon).

Through some sophisticated, well developed algorithms, it should be possible to leverage the vast number of blogs which they search to come up with personalised recommendations for a person based on their OPML file and/or web history, by analysing past reading patterns and then ranking possible content recommendations by similarity and discussion on other blogs. At the moment all they do is come up with the one-size-fits-all suggestions that you see on the homepage, which is possibly useful but of fairly limited value.

All in all, an update that goes in the right direction but isn’t massively exciting. The UI is now impressive, and they appear to have recognised their importance in facilitating the discovery of content. They’re not doing such a great job in that, or the universal search idea, at the moment but that will come. They face the ever-present challenge of Google Blogsearch, but seem to be growing well and crucially they are out-innovating Google in the space at the moment.