The new Technorati is a massive improvement. The notoriously erratic search engine now produces snappy results. And it is, finally, clearly, a search engine. (See screenshot below.) Dave Sifry's venture began as a tool for egomaniac bloggers to track mentions, and became, variously, a blog discovery engine, a tag repository, a brand monitoring service, often all at the same time. The site has finally settled down. Valleywag has been extremely critical of Technorati, because Sifry was constantly making excuses for the service's lack of reliability, and promising greater things that came to nothing, and his charm gradually wore off. The revamped site is what Technorati should have been, all along, an uncluttered search engine, majoring in current results, often from blogs, but not exclusively. Unfortunately, in the meantime, Sifry's company, backed by Mobius and DFJ, has been through three dilutive rounds of funding; Sifry's reached his limits as chief exec; and Google is integrating features such as blog and video search into its main engine. Technorati has found its way, but too late.