Technorati One Billion Links

Technorati, a search engine for blogs, just passed the 1 billion mark of links tracked in its database. This milestone was announced tonight by Technorati founder David Sifry at a Technorati user salon that took place near their offices in San Francisco. Here’s some photos shot at tonight’s event.

Technorati makes extensive use of tags. Tags can be used for any keyword or category. For instance, at the bottom of this post, you’ll notice that I have added a tag for “technorati”. When you visit Technorati’s page for that tag, you will see all the blogs (like this one) that have “technorati” listed as a tag or category, as well as photos from Flickr (including those I shot tonight) and links from Furl and Delicious with the same tag.

Of course one of the main features of Technorati is searching for keywords or urls in blogs. It works like other search engines, except in this case instead of searching everything on the internet, the search is specific to blogs. You can even create “watchlists” for keywords and Technorati will create a custom RSS feed that you can subscribe to keep track of blogs that reference those keywords.

Technorati ranks all of the blogs they index in what they call their “Cosmos”. Here are the top 100 blogs in the Technorati Cosmos. You’ll notice that our good friends at Boing Boing are topping the charts these days and so far they are the undisputed champions of the Blogosphere (yeah, I never thought I would use that word either). The Technorati Cosmos will show how many links and how many sources of those links each indexed blog has. If you have a blog, do an ego search and see who’s linking to you and how you rank. As word gets out about your blog, you’ll be able to watch your empire grow.