Better Canned Searches

I've set up a number of canned searches with Google News to search for stuff I'm interested in: knowledge management, communities of practice, e-learning, etc. Nothing fancy, just run the search and bookmark the URL. The results were always so-so. Not much of interest.

The other day I tried setting up the same searches in Technorati, and the results are much better, much more interesting.

The difference? The search algorithm is surely different, but my guess is that the main differentiator lies in the data set. Google searches against official news sites, while Technorati searches against weblogs. I'm sure that means something.