All that downtime wasn’t for nothing, it seems. Technorati, one of the best blog search engines and aggregators, has returned after some downtime with a shiny new design.

The new design can shortly be described as “getting rid of everything unnecessary”. All the clutter from the homepage is gone; what’s left is a search bar, a tag cloud, and several popular blogs. We like it: we’re just not sure about the scrolling tag list on the top of the screen which seems, well, annoying.

The popular and favorites lists seem to be pretty much the same, but a lot more prominence has been given to WTF, the slightly confusing Digg-like part of Technorati. It now looks a lot more like a true read-submit-vote-comment site.

We still think that WTF items should simply link to blog articles indexed by Technorati. As it is, the submitters are actually writing mini-articles on something, which is not a bad idea by itself, but it’s probably confusing many users who got used to the simplicity of Digg and Reddit.