Deep in the FAQ's there is this clarification:
What about an RSS search engine? Is that different from what Technorati does?
Yes. RSS feeds are a subset of the World Live Web. An RSS search engine searches only content structured in specialized XML formats such as RSS and Atom but does not look at a site's HTML or other markup. Not all blogs have RSS feeds, and some sites that are not blogs (such as The New York Times or some online event calendars) do have RSS feeds. Many blogs only send out a small portion or summary of their full postings and leave the full postings on their sites as HTML. Technorati specializes in searching all blogs, not merely those with RSS feeds, and instead of only indexing the RSS feed (often the first few hundred words of an article), Technorati reads all of the HTML code in a blog posting, and also tracks all of the activity around a blog or post such as inbound and outbound links.
Technorati's claim that it "searches all blogs" appears to be hype. I searched for a number of names and subjects and was very surprised by the limited hit list. Then I found this in the FAQ:
Make sure your blog is pinging Technorati. Technorati does not index a blog unless a ping is received from the blog to initiate our spiders to visit the site.
Also, if blog entries have been archived, Technorati can't see and index them. No wonder I'm not finding "all blogs".
Also, it seems curious that I can't easily find info on the lag time between a blog post and Technorati's indexing. It seems that this would be crucial, since you'd probably search blogs for just-happened news that hasn't yet hit websites.
Technorati and libraries? Seems it is another reference resource (when all else fails).
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