How Technorati Could Become Relevant Again
Blog search engine Technorati made a fresh round of promises this morning, assuring users that the service will be less awful soon once a new anti-spam program is put in place. The company says it sees nearly 10 million unique visitors each month but we cringe a bit every time we visit the site. It doesn't have to be that way.
Blogsearch in general is rife with spam and Technorati is at a real disadvantage compared to other blogsearch engines, but that's not the company's only problem. What would you like to see Technorati do in order to be relevant again? Below is our wish list.
Spam Control
The number one problem with Technorati is definitely spam blogs showing up in search results. Ask.com's blog search does a decent job of limiting spam by priortizing search results from feeds with a number of subscribers in the company's popular feed reader Bloglines. We could write a whole other post about what we wish Ask's blogsearch would do to improve too, though.
Google Blogsearch could take a similar step for spam control by referencing subscriptions in Google Reader. It may already have done so, but there's little evidence of active developement in Google Blogsearch.
When using Technorati, we've taken to running search feed through Yahoo Pipes and filtering out items with relatively low inbound links or from sources with a lot of spam on a given topic. That's not a lot of fun to have to do, but we sure appreciate those numbers being made available in the company's feeds.
Technorati has issued some new guidelines for being included in less spammy search results, but we'll see how well they work over the coming weeks and months. Some of the guidelines seem fairly arbitrary, like publishing a full instead of an excerpted feed and pinging Technorati directly instead of through a 3rd party. We assume that pings from Feedburner will still be welcome.
Uptime
Technorati returns a "we're sorry, there was an error - try again later" message far more than the other blog search engines do. The first several times we tried searching for inbound links to the new spam control announcement today we got that message.
Return sort by authority to blog directory and elsewhere
There was a time when Technorati's Blog Directory was a pretty good place to discover top blogs on any topic. It displayed blogs that had been tagged by authors as relevant to certain topics and let you sort the list by most inbound links in the last 6 months. Inexplicably, the sort by authority option was removed months ago and the blog directory is now under emphasized in favor of various bizarre options for browsing blogs topically. It's now relatively unusable.
If I'm interested in discovering the top blogs about cooking, for example, it sure would be nice if I could navigate directly to http://technorati.com/blogs/tag/cooking and find them in some intelligable order.
Pageview churn
Possibly the most annoying thing about Technorati these days is that search results aren't easy to navigate. From the front page of the site you're taken to full text search results but the headlines on the page don't link to the posts, they link to a Technorati page about the posts. The actual post links are small and grey below the headlines. That's absolutely contemptable.
From other pages, searches will bring you to other search results. The whole thing is ridiculous.
We'll leave complaints about poor, messy site design alone for now - the service has enough other problems. The company is moving its emphasis over to providing an ad network and letting its basic functionality fall by the wayside. Investors have been complaining for some time about Technorati's performance and we're all suffering as a result. Are there not enough ad networks in the world already? Technorati should make its own traffic grow by serving its users better and monetize that. The company tried a number of functional partnerships with other publishers, like the Washington Post for example, but apparently couldn't figure out how to make money from that. That's a shame.
Come on Technorati - we're honestly cheering for you! There's a huge need out there and you could be filling it.
What would readers like to see Technorati do in order to become relevant again? Leave your thoughts in comments, the company is sure to read them and maybe something positive will happen.
Comments
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I would add that Technorati is in a unique position to leverage their knowledge of Microformats and offer some kind of API that helps bloggers, content creators the means to parse their site and then return some nice, cleanly formated mark-up - automatically by machine. That Kitchen thing they have now sucks:
http://kitchen.technorati.com
( I'd pay money for that service. Shhhhhhhh don't tell them that though )
Posted by: Todd | August 20, 2008 10:05 AM
Todd, that's a great idea. I swear, there are a number of things I'd be uniquely willing to pay Technorati for if they proved they could deliver.
I have completely lost faith in Technorati. It's gonna take an aweful lot before they get any cred from me again. Rock solid suggestions Marshall :)
Posted by: dc crowley | August 20, 2008 10:49 AM
Obviously Regator is not Technorati (and we really don't want to be), but if you have any ideas for some blogger widgets or tools like a auto-markup tool we may be able to help you out. We are already doing some cool things within our system to parse and analyze blog content for keyword densities, etc... so any ideas? let us know info *a* regator.com
Posted by: Scott Lockhart | August 20, 2008 10:49 AM
Technorati has completely fallen from grace.
I think the recent launch of blogs.com is an indication of what's to come.
Its hard to fix a service like Technorati when it's already rotten and broken at the core, but I agree... I'm rooting for them!!
Julie Kentwood
CMO, www.groupROAR.com
Posted by: Julie Kentwood | August 20, 2008 11:05 AM
@Regator sales dude
My snotty comments are exclusively for the annoyance of RWW readers and are not to be re-purposed for your "cold calling" sale pitch disguised as comment. KTHXBAI
Posted by: Todd | August 20, 2008 11:12 AM
We've been working on a new release of Spinn3r which is going to have a new and very advanced ranking system for blogs.
I think we'll probably publish the data in some open form for bloggers to keep tabs on their rank.
Our model will have a solid theoretical and mathematical background which should yield a very solid ranking framework.
Should be interesting in that we're licensing to blog search companies now that haven't launched yet :)
Posted by: Kevin Burton | August 20, 2008 11:14 AM
I used to like Technorati, but I also literally get error messages at random times each time that I go through pages of results. This has been happening to me for over a year now, and there's just no excuse for that.
Before I even go to Technorati, I already know that it's going to disappoint me in some way.
Posted by: Brandon Watts | August 20, 2008 2:12 PM
Marshall,
Thanks for posting this. Technorati has been working under the tension between coverage of the blogosphere and quality for a long time. Web spam is a huge industry with lots of resources dedicated towards manipulating search services, including ours. We've taken a very critical look at our indexing policy, core systems, front end, feature set, site stability and site performance; your post highlights many of the same issues but I'm glad to see your perspective on them. What Dorion posted about today is one aspect of the changes afoot. There are more fixes and innovations coming, hopefully you, along with millions of other bloggers and their readers, will find them to be of service.
Thanks again!
-Ian
Technorati
Posted by: Ian Kallen | August 20, 2008 5:41 PM
For real, I don't know to take benefit from Technorati. Is it a scanning, alert tool, or something else? My previous experience was never satisfying. Searching on them yields non interesting stuff? Do I need to keep on searching each day, or they simply don't have better relevancy formula for us users? I'm wondering.
Hmm, I don't know Technorati has a kitchen. Thanks for pointing out :)
Posted by: Akhmad Fathonih
|
August 20, 2008 6:21 PM
technorati had its moment under the sun...it passed and they missed their chance. can any of you actually name one person that goes to technorati before another engine (google or any blog SE)? no, because not only are their results overun with spam, their service has become useless.
there really is no "need" for a blog search engine now that the big G and Y index those sites just as fast, and can segment traditional journalism from "blogs".
they should have sold out while they were still worth something...now they are just hosting expenses + lame marketing...
whens the last time someone got excited to add the technorati links to the bottom of their posts? "years" ago...that equates to eons in web timeline
Posted by: not there | August 20, 2008 7:27 PM
I use technorati but it is seriously flawed in the blog authority department because a lot of bloggers has participated in link/tag schemes to increase their authority. But a lot of them actually gets only a handful of visitors/not enough traffic, but still gets tagged becauseof so many cheats.
Posted by: Showbiz Intriga? Get it From Boy! | August 23, 2008 4:34 AM