Techmeme adds search, becomes useful to the general public

by Brad Linder May 20th 2008

Over the last few years, technology news site Techmeme has gotten a lot of attention in the technology blogosphere. That's because it's a tool for tracking conversations and hot topics in the tech blogosphere. Yes, part of the reason we as tech bloggers pay so much attention to Techmeme is because we're self absorbed. But the site has also been a great source of news. Want to know what today's biggest stories are? Techmeme will tell you.

But Techmeme has historically done a pretty lousy job of telling you yesterday's big stories. Or last week's. Or last years. Because the site has lacked any sort of a search function. But today, Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera finally added a search box to the site.

Only the top stories are indexed. And by default only the fist few sentences from each story. So Techmeme isn't exactly a Google News killer. You won't find every article ever written about a topic. But what you will find are some of the top stories (or at least the most discussed/blogged about stories) written about a topic. Or if you want to find every article from a certain source that made it onto Techmeme, you can just search for a URL. For example sourceurl:"http://www.downloadsquad.com" brings up a list of Download Squad stories that have been featured on the site.

The launch of the search tool actually makes Techmeme a site worth visiting if you're not just trying to figure out which stories Download Squad, TechCrunch, CNET, ReadWriteWeb, and Engadget are covering today.

Tags: search, techmeme, techmeme-search

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