Thoughts on Technorati

I "played around" with Technorati for about 5 hours reading the commentaries and searching with terms that were meaningful to me and relevant to the courses I teach. I wanted to see what kind of material was available using those terms as tags. I used terms such as rats, albinic rats, pigmented rats, Long-Evans rats, laboratory rats and breeding rats.

I was surprised with the kind of materials accessed in Technorati by using those terms as tags. For example, the term rat elicited a comment referring to someone as a "rat bastard," which was not what I expected. Overall, the material tagged with those terms did not provide the scientific/technical information that I wanted. Then I did a Google search, using the same terms, and compared the results. I found more credible information by using Google than by using Technorati.

I shouldn't have been surprised, given that we are talking about two different types of information resources.