Niall Kennedy broke the news this morning of a new Technorati feature: multiple tag search.

You can now search Technorati for multiple tags! Just separate each tag with the word "OR" to add an posts tagged with your specified tag to your search results.

Multiple tags are a great way to follow your favorite topics while accounting for the variety of methods people tag their posts. A tag search for college OR university displays the latest posts indexed by Technorati tagged with either "college" or "university." You could also mix tags in an area of interest such as tracking the mobile gaming industry through a tag search for PSP OR GameBoy.

Well, this is a good step forward. However, if we're talking boolean searches here, how about "and" - that's where the power is. Specificity. Have you ever tackled a very broad word such as "coffee" or "blogging" - watch out. Others echo this statement.

What we need is that way to dig into the results easily and quickly. Using a boolean search with "and" is one way - using a tag cloud refining technique is another. Each page can have its cloud of words often used in pairing with that tag - and then you dig down, each time to a narrower topic since the tags are all considered together, not separately.

Via Social Software Weblog Tags: technorati, tags, tagging