First, the news: the best tech news aggregator out there - or memetracker as we like to call it - Techmeme, has added a long sought feature: search. Nothing too fancy, although the advanced options are a plenty, as you can see from the screenshot below. And damn useful, I might add.
Note the checkbox. By default, Techmeme search only matches keywords found in the title and the summary; you need to uncheck "Search title & summary only" if you want to search the full text of articles.
Why the Technorati mention? Well, Techmeme search effectively kills the last big reason I've had to visit Technorati. Techmeme now has it all. Tracking news on blogs? Check. Following conversations/trackbacks? Check. (Technorati's Percolator does this, but not as good as Techmeme) Top list of blogs, if you care for that sort of thing? Check. And now there's search, which has lately been the only reason why I'd go to Technorati - to quickly search what the blogosphere has been saying about a topic.
The only advantage of Technorati at this point is that it tracks all blogs and it follows all kinds of blogs, while Techmeme focuses on tech news only. TechMeme does however have sites running off of the same algorihm in other categories, such as WeSmirch for celebrity news and Memeorandum for politics, though those don't yet have the new search features.