Tech news site TechMeme launched on September 12, 2005. It was an immediate hit and remains the most important blog news aggregator: Dan Farber wrote perhaps the best description of the site to date, back in 2007: “TechMeme provides a one-page, aggregated, filtered, archiveable summary in near real-time of what is new and generating conversation.”
But right from the start people noted that TechMeme had no search feature. Founder Gabe Rivera answered at the time: Don’t hold your breath. For posterity’s sake, here’s our first post on TechMeme, then called Memeorandum.
Anyway, those days are over, starting today. TechMeme search launched moments ago at techmeme.com/search, making it easy to find archived stories. Results are returned only for items that have appeared as full headlines on Techmeme, in reverse chronological order. Headlines appearing only in “Discussion” are excluded. And basic search only returns results that appear in the title of the item or in the first couple of sentences.
There is also an advanced search feature, however, that allows for full text search of the underlying blog post or article. Users can also search just by date, author, source, etc.
For now, Rivera says, he’s only releasing search for TechMeme. Search for sister sites Memeorandum (political news), WeSmirch (celebrity gossib) and Ballbug (baseball news) will come “soon.”
TechMeme also isn’t just a one-person shop any more. Rivera hired his first employee, Omer Horvitz, who built the search feature, late last year.
See the BloggerBoard for details on the top tech blogs and bloggers based on TechMeme headline data.
Update: Well we had this exclusively for all of 10 minutes. TechMeme’s post on the new feature is here.
