“In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site,” Sifry said on the Technorati blog. “No more.”

A search will now deliver all the possible social media results Technorati can find for a query. Blog posts, videos, images, and podcasts are all in play when doing a search. Sifry credited tagging for driving this change:

This is being facilitated by the phenomenon of tags and tagging, which helps to unify and organize the rapidly expanding world of user-generated media. As more and more publishing tools support the use of tags, the better we are able to assemble collections of social media based on the interests of our users.

Pure blog search has not been abandoned. People who only want blog post results for a search, without the extra “bells and whistles” of multimedia in their results, can get them at s.technorati.com. That pulls up a search page with the bare necessities: search box, language options, and choice of blog authority.

The speed of the blog-only search will be a joy for people who have long complained that Technorati had become bogged down over time. It’s screaming fast now.

Sifry also promised that more updates and innovations would be forthcoming this year. The site has experienced substantial traffic growth, with people demanding all kinds of results. If they can pull off those future changes with the same skill as they did with speeding up search, we will be very eager to see what’s coming next.

Don’t hold your breath on the State of the Blogosphere report, though. The Blogosphere’s all grown up now and has changed its name to the Live Web, a post-pubescent transmogrification that includes blogs, photos, videos, music, events, and tags. Sifry’s State of the Live Web report is due out later this week.

Sifry called the growth of tagged media pages "phenomenal."

"As the use of tags becomes more ubiquitous across all forms of social media and the publishing platforms that support them," he said, "they’ve become the lingua franca of the Live Web – the way in which people all over the world indicate what topics or issues are top of mind and guiding self-expression."

Business has been good for Technorati. In March, the site attracted over nine million unique visitors, a 141 percent increase over the previous quarter. Online metrics firm Hitwise recently reported that Technorati was again, after a brief slip to Google’s Blog Search, the most used blog search engine.

Google’s been a much tougher competitor in the blog search world lately, ever since the company integrated a Blog Search link with Google News.

Even that extra homepage exposure hasn’t been able out-promote the word-of-mouth cred Technorati’s been enjoying recently. Robert Scoble indicates that Technorati has been the talk of South Park – the one in San Francisco, that is.

The Scobeleizer is challenging his readers to pit the two engines against each other and share results. Early testing shows Technorati bringing back twice as many results as Google.

"It does look like Technorati has pulled ahead again in this race," he said. "The UI on Technorati is certainly ahead of Google’s."

Speaking of UI’s, Tantek Celik also brings our attention to three new Technorati widgets, which can be embedded on a blog or website, designed to give live information about the current top searches, top tags, and best authority (authority’s important for linking).