Google Blogoscoped

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Technorati Criticism

Jason Kottke says good-bye to blog search engine Technorati:

“That’s it. I’ve had it. No more Technorati. I’ve used the site for, what, a couple of years now to keep track of what people were saying about posts on kottke.org and searching blogs for keywords or current events. During that time, it’s been down at least a quarter of the time (although it’s been better recently), results are often unavailable for queries with large result sets (i.e. this is only going to become a bigger problem as time goes on), and most of the rest of the time it’s slow as molasses.

When it does return results in a timely fashion for links to kottke.org, the results often include old links that I’ve seen before in the results set, sometimes from months ago. And that’s to say nothing of the links Technorati doesn’t even display. The “kottke.org” smart list in my newsreader picks up stuff that Technorati never seems to get, and that’s only pulling results from the ~200 blogs I read, most of which are not what you’d call obscure. What good is keeping track of 14 million blogs if you’re missing 200 well-known ones? (And trackbacks perform even better...this post got 159 trackbacks but only 93 sites linking to it on Technorati.)”

I’m afraid he’s right the site is down rather often, and also often returns irrelevant (and not enough relevant) results. I’ve also had other troubles with it in the past; like getting my tags indexed, or validating my blog.

Nevertheless, Technorati recently had a major design overhaul and they look better than ever. (Which doesn’t mean the new design is an improvement in all places; I feel like seeing the top 100 blogs when I click on a link titled “Top 100 Blogs”, and not just 3 blogs...) In the end, the world is still one great blog and backlinks search engine short... why isn’t Google filling the spot yet?

Well, for now I’m using Technorati itself to find feedback on Jason’s article. Here’s some of it:

Technorati’s Dave Sifry responds to the last one, saying:

“You got it. We’re working at 110% on scaling and speed issues. You’ll notice that keyword search was the first thing that got fixed, and cosmos (URL) search is next. You should start to notice things working better this month and next.

Sorry that things are still slow for you. We’re working as fast as we can, putting in new hardware, in order to eliminate the problems you’re experiencing.”

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!