We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN's ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media - and in particular bloggers. That's a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it's still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

The list below is ://URLFAN's all-time top 10. The number in brackets to the right of each item is last year's top 10 ranking (Nov '08).

#1. en.wikipedia.org (1)
#2. youtube.com (3)
#3. flickr.com (2)
#4. twitter.com (9)
#5. google.com (4)
#6. myspace.com (6)
#7. facebook.com (-)
#8. imdb.com (5)
#9. nytimes.com (7)
#10. apple.com (8)

There is one new entrant, Facebook at #7. washingtonpost.com moved out of the top 10, dropping from #10 last year to #12 this year.

Twitter is the biggest mover, up 5 places to #4.

Wikipedia is still the most cited website on the Web, for social media users and bloggers. YouTube and Flickr, two oft-used media sharing services, occupy the next two spots.

Last year we noted that there were 10 independent blogs in the top 100, including ReadWriteWeb. There are the same number this year, with a couple of new entrants. Here is the blog list circa November '09, again with last year's rank bracketed:

#23 techcrunch.com (#25)
#26 huffingtonpost.com (#32)
#33 engadget.com (#28)
#37 boingboing.net (#29)
#39 gizmodo (-)
#41 mashable.com (#91)
#53 arstechnica.com (#50)
#60 lifehacker.com (#63)
#78 readwriteweb.com (#97)
#93 smashing magazine (-)

Finally, what's new at ://URLFEED this year? You guessed it, a Real-Time Web feature! The site has introduced a Real-time Buzz Radar, which tracks buzzwords in the blogosphere. 'Chrome OS' is number 5 on the list currently, on the back of Google's Chrome OS event last week.

://URLFAN isn't a perfect measure of influence - you could easily argue that Google's PageRank is far better. However we continue to like the concept and we believe it's an accurate and up-to-date reflection of influential websites on the Web.

The same API used for ranking by the AdAge 150 and the Atlantic Monthly's new political blogger leaderboard is thus now generally available. Determining the most-closely watched bloggers on niche topics is something a lot of people want to do for a wide variety of reasons - when that determination can be made programatically you can jump into the center of a conversation quickly.

Some good sample lists are Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik's favorite a href="http://www.postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/cloud">cloud computing blogs or the general list of top design blogs. The new APIs will make it easy to build lists around any topic or group and display that data on other sites.

Blogsearch data has been a consistent problem for PostRank, both Technorati and Google Blogsearch data has been inconsistent for the company. PostRank says it will be launching its own trackback discovery service shortly.

While some meme-tracking services struggle with niches where blogs don't heavily link to eachother, PostRank says that by tracking multiple forms of user interaction it has captured data that closely resembles what can be found from services tracking absolute web traffic to individual sites.

Last month PostRank released a new analytics tool that displays social media engagement on top of Google Analytics data. The new APIs will allow 1000 requests a day for free for noncommercial use, commercial licenses are available as well.

Disclosure: PostRank is a sponsor of the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. It's also one of our favorite services on the web.

Earlier in the email Technorati addresses why member authority has fallen across the site. The company explains, "As our intent is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis, we stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations."

If this tells us anything, it's that in this new environment of conversational media, many have abandoned their blogs for less labor intensive forms of expression. We just hope the company has some form of compensation for contributors. It'll be tough convincing bloggers to contribute posts and patch holes in what might already be a sinking ship. Nevertheless, if you're the type of person who likes a challenge and you've got the energy to increase your posts, you can apply for the program on Technorati's contact page.

With a catchphrase like, "Where the Blogosphere and Twittersphere meet" it will be interesting to see which sphere will hype the service more. Some of the featured bloggerati include ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, Huffington Post Editor Arianna Huffington and Zen Habits founder Leo Babauta.

Like any good Twitter-related service, Twittorati also has its own Twitter account with a feed to the site's hottest trending topics. We'll be watching closely to see how the site's trend results differ from those displayed on Twitter's newly redesigned landing page.

While the company has been working on this new infrastructure for over six months and the larger blog platforms have been using the new crawler for some time, Technorati expects to see all blogs utilizing the new crawler by the end of next week.

Over the past year Technorati has been getting a lot of attention for its inability to crawl and index blogs efficiently, so this may be great news for bloggers who have for a long time bemoaned having to manually ping Technorati each time they publish a new post.

And it's not only the smaller blogs that have experienced this. Only yesterday, while looking at the top 100 blogs in Technorati, we noticed that ReadWriteWeb had not been crawled in 23 hours. That's a long time considering we had published ten posts and therefore pinged the service ten times in that period of time.

While we can't be certain that this new crawler will make indexing faster, we're pleased to see Technorati striving to become more relevant and useful at a time when really great, really fast blog search is essential.

In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.

Different circumstances call for different search engines. We've made a chart below illustrating our different recommendations to fill different needs. When, for example, we're looking to see if anyone else has written about a breaking news story yet - we use Google Blogsearch because it's the fastest. When we're putting a live search feed on a public web page, though, we use Technorati and crank up the spam-control it offers. Many businesses use profesional blog tracking services for some of their search needs, but we're not convinced those services are as useful as grabbing some of these worn old tools and doing it yourself.

Where These Services Stand Today

Technorati is the old stand-by, the blog search engine that the smartest blog lovers used to use. These days it's a sad shadow of what it used to be. The company leadership is focused on building an advertising network and search features have been shed like there's no tomorrow. The company's developers say that features will be returning, just in a more accessible form, but we're not holding our breath.

The service is slow, misses a lot of search results (perhaps in the name of spam prevention) and is so loaded down with cruft and extraneous page loads that it makes us want to scream.

That said, the fundamental value proposition of Technorati remains - it counts inbound links to every blog it has indexed and it will let you sort by that metric of "authority." More advanced RSS-heads will appreciate the fact that Technorati delivers "authority" numbers in its RSS feeds and those numbers can be used to fine tune spam filtering in Yahoo Pipes.

Google Blogsearch is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with memetracking on the front page. Google Blogsearch spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It's painful to look at Google Blogsearch results pages, but if you've got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries - then it's a good option.

IceRocket is Mark Cuban's baby and has improved more in recent years than anyone else on this list. It's quite a sophisticated tool for searching blogs. It's got trend analysis, author awareness and a number of other cool features. Unfortunately it only lets you organize search results by data and sometimes other needs arise.

IceRocket also misses some search results that even Technorati catches, though it catches some that Technorati misses as well.

Ask.com Blogsearch has become an unexpected favorite of ours over the years. It's nice. Spam control is pretty good, speed is pretty good, the size of the index is pretty good. It's a pretty good blog search engine. The best thing about it is that it's very easy to sort results by relevance, date or "popularity" of the source, as defined by the number of subscribers the source feed has in Ask's formerly market dominant feed reader Bloglines. Want to find out who the biggest blogs are that have written about Chihuahuas lately? (We'll just tell you, it's Jalopnik, Celebrity Baby Blog and Fark.)

If there's a downside here, it's that Ask does index a fair number of feeds that aren't really blogs. And it doesn't do anything else that's particularly fabulous. None the less, we find ourselves going back to it every day.

FriendFeed is a lot of things, but it's also a blog search engine of sorts. It's a cross-network, real time social site originally built by a team of ex-Google employees. It's pretty awesome and once you've got an account there you can search blog posts, Twitter messages, YouTube videos, SlideShare powerpoint presentations and much more. The down side is of course, it only lets you search the content that other users have synced with their FriendFeed account. That content has a whole lot of conversation going on around it though! Several members of the ReadWriteWeb team use the newly launched FriendDeck to do real-time tracking of FriendFeed. You can meet our whole team on FriendFeed here or join us in the RWW room (open to anyone) here.

That's How We See it - What's Blog Search Like for You These Days?

We'd love to hear about your favorite blog search tools these days. What do you use and in what circumstances do you use it? Is blog search itself old news in a new era of real-time microblogging? We welcome other perspectives on this field that may have lost some of its luster but remains useful and important several years after it was so hyped.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look out Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for everyday use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable anymore.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's a huge amount of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There are also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URL much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heartbroken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, and an algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category. The search results page is really random-looking; good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled only with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech-focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, Diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche-specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blog search on the web. It uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche-specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:
Ask does get overloaded sometimes and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't rely on it alone. Ask Blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.

What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.

1. en.wikipedia.org
2. flickr.com
3. youtube.com
4. google.com
5. imdb.com
6. myspace.com
7. nytimes.com
8. apple.com
9. twitter.com
10. washingtonpost.com

The entire top 100 is listed here. Where the comparisons to Alexa and Google fall down is that ://URLFAN doesn't measure how many people visit a website, only how many blogs mention it. So the resulting ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media and in particular bloggers - which is still a relatively small proportion of the world. So although ://URLFAN states that "unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results", it's also fair to point out that the concrete data they're using is from a small subset of the population.

Still, we do think ://URLFAN is an interesting measure of influence. The social media users of this world are known to be highly influential when it comes to products, opinions and so on. So in that regard ://URLFAN's index is a decent measure of influence and therefore potentially valuable to marketers. We can see for example that Flickr and Twitter are being used a lot by influencers, which is good to know if you want to attract the attention of those people.

In terms of blogs, there are just under 10 independent ones that we counted in the top 100. ReadWriteWeb is one of them, in at #97.

Note: we noticed that many of the websites listed had a big jump in "positive mentions" in October-November, making us think that perhaps ://URLFAN's index increased markedly at that time.

Other independent blogs that make it to the top 100:

• techcrunch.com #25
• engadget.com #28
• boingboing.net #29
• huffingtonpost.com #32
• arstechnica.com #50
• lifehacker.com #63
• dailykos.com #82
• mashable.com #91

This is pretty good company to be in. It must be said too that there are a lot of mainstream newspaper websites in the list, so clearly 'old media' is still pretty influential!

It's important to point out that a large part of AdEngage's business comes from adult sites (2112 out of 3577 currently active sites are classified as adult). This is probably the main reason why Technorati decided to let AdEngage continue to operate under its own name for now.

Self-Serve Advertising

Technorati will first launch the new advertising network as a private alpha, focusing mostly on text ads. Next month, the site will launch publicly and Technorati will add 125x125 image ads as well.

Bloggers are always looking for new ways to monetize their traffic and having another option from a large and respected company like Technorati should draw in quite a few publishers. Most small blogs currently rely on Google AdSense for their income, but a lot of bloggers have also been complaining about the low income they receive from running these ads. Judging from what we have seen so far, Technorati's offering might be a compelling alternative to Google's AdSense, especially for smaller sites.

Tag Cloud and Top Stories

Iterend indexes about 250,000 blogs. Once you log in, you are greeted by a very large tag cloud on the left side of the screen and a list of the top stories of the past 24 hours on the right. It is not quite clear how Iterend determines this list, but it simply seems to look at how often a story was linked to. Currently, this list is dominated by political stories.

The tag cloud is a bit overwhelming at first. To see all of it, you have to scroll down and it includes over 250 keywords.

Search

The search engine itself relies heavily on tag clouds as well. For every search, Iterend displays two tag clouds that allow you to drill down deeper into your search: one for related phrases and one for related categories.

If you search for "McCain," for example, Iterend will suggest searching for "Obama" or "Sarah Palin." This actually works quite well and allows you to filter your searches quickly and effortlessly. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for every search.

Verdict

Iterend has a lot of potential. However, the company needs to make sure that its index is more up to date. Today, most blog search engines index a post within minutes after it is posted, so having a 20 hour delay simply takes away any reason to even start using this service - unless you are looking for old news.

Invites

Iterend gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Just follow this link and give it a try.

Blog search engine and ad network Technorati released its 5th annual State of the Blogosphere report and the numbers are quite interesting. Technorati says its findings indicate that blogging is now mainstream. We're not so sure. Although reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream, is writing them?

Popularity of Blogging

In 2004, the first year Technorati issued a State of the Blogosphere report, the company said it was tracking 4 million blogs. By October of 2005 that number had risen to 19.6 million and between 2% and 8% of new blogs created each day were judged to be fake or spam blogs. In April of 2007 that number was up to 70 million blogs that the company had effectively indexed and today the number is up to to 133 million total blogs indexed since the company started indexing blogs. So the number nearly doubled in the last year.

Of those 133 million blogs that Technorati has indexed - guess how many of them have been posted to in the last 7 days? 1.1% of them, or 1.5 million total.

Just for context, 1.6 million people in the US have defaulted on their mortgages last year. In 2005 there were 1.6 million people around the world who could speak Esperanto. 1.6 million people went to the Minnesota State Fair last year.

Is blogging mainstream? Globally, fewer people are posting to their blogs each week than go to the Minnesota State Fair or speak Esperanto. Maybe the impact of blogging on media is comparable to the economic impact of an equivalent number of people defaulting on their mortgages, but that would be a pretty drastic statement to make.

Trying to blog (as 130 million+ people have in the past 6 years) may be somewhat mainstream, but actually blogging does not seem to be so yet.

Demographically - Is This Representative?

What's the stereotype of a blogger in mainstream media? They (we) are underemployed, marginally educated loners with tiny rabid audiences. How do the results of Technorati's survey of bloggers work out relative to that? Add disproportionately well-off and you'd hit the nail on the head.

Only 56% of bloggers in the US report that they have a full time job. 74% of them are college graduates and 51% have an annual household income of over $75,000. We're not sure how that works, but the old trope of living in mom and dad's basement doesn't seem an entirely unrealistic explanation.

The average number of monthly unique visitors reported by these bloggers? In the US it's only 18,000. That means 600 people per day. 600 people reading your thoughts each day is pretty fabulous for the vast majority of people on the planet, but as media goes it's not very mainstream. Especially if there are only a million and a half people doing it.

Blogging Appears to Be Slowing Down

This year's report finds that there are on average 900,000 blog posts created every 24 hours. In last year's report that number was 1.5 million and in 2006 it was 1.3 million. 2005's report from Technorati didn't include this number and 2004's report put it at 400,000 posts per day.

2004: 400,000 blog posts per day.
2005: ?
2006: 1.3 million blog posts per day
2007: 1.5 million blog posts per day
2008: 900,000 blog posts per day

Technorati says it has culled a large number of spam blogs out of its index this year, but it's focused extensively on spam blogs every year. The evidence seems fairly clear - blogging is slowing down.

Is Any of This Something to Be Ashamed of?

No! The fact that publishing is opening up to millions more people around the world is a beautiful thing. The fact that many of them report being well-to-do and underemployed at the same time is something to take into consideration but not a repudiation of the medium. The fact that only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week does indicate that none of this has really stuck with large numbers of people, however.

Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred. Writing full length blog posts even as regularly as once a week is hard, though. We expect that microblogging may become more popular than blogging, if it hasn't already! From updating your status message on Facebook or MySpace, to posting 140 word updates on lunch or politics on Twitter to offering truncated public religious testimonials on a site like Gospelr (Twitter for Christians) - there are a whole lot of people already microblogging, if you will.

Our boss, RWW Founding Editor Richard MacManus, contributed this quote to the Technorati report: "The future of blogs will have arrived when you check your favorite blog for sports news in the morning, instead of your local paper." That's a whole different matter, though, than the writing of blogs becoming mainstream. Blogging may become centralized, profesionalized and increasingly scarce - just like other forms of media have, perhaps to a lesser degree.

Those Are Our Thoughts, What Are Yours?

The Technorati State of the Blogosphere is an incredible service and the data the company comes up with is very much appreciated. We hope you'll take a look at it and share some of your thoughts.

Our analysis above is centered almost entirely on the US portion of the numbers, as well. We'd love to read some thoughts from our international readers about the differences in numbers between US bloggers and those in Europe and Asia. African and Latin American bloggers and blog readers - we'd love to know how the lay of the land looks in your neck of the woods relative to these numbers as well.

We love blogs and we love blogging. Even if we don't believe that blog writing is mainstream yet, or maybe that it ever will be, we appreciate the opportunity to look at this cultural force in a quantitative way.

This is not the first time that Apple had issues with its power adapters. In August, Apple announced that it was investigating issues with its MagSafe power adapters for the MacBook and MacBook Pro line. According to some users, these adapters tend to overheat, short out, and burn.

With millions of iPhone 3G phones sold in the last few months, this is a major undertaking for Apple. The only advantage for Apple is that these power adapters are relatively inexpensive. Currently, replacement adapters retail for $29, though Apple's actual cost is surely a lot less. Apple will probably take a small financial hit from this, but the real question will be if the image of the iPhone will be tarnished by this recall - especially after so many users have already complained about other problems with the phone.

- One big negative impact of the market mayhem on the start-up world.
- One big positive impact of the market mayhem on the start-up world.
- One trend that seemed to be everywhere.

In other words, like Twitter and 37 Signals, I was deliberately reducing, cutting out, eliminating, restricting to ONE thing in each case. So here goes...

One big positive impact of the market mayhem on the start-up world - this is like the Boston area when DEC and Wang imploded. Thousands of really smart people were left without a paycheck. Many of them started great companies. You heard this vividly at the Conference. The phrase "refugee" was common as in "I am Bear Stearns refugee". And then they went on to pitch their start-up. You cannot possibly say it feels good now, there were some bruised people walking around, but it may well be that we will look back on this moment as the genuine transformational moment in the New York start-up economy. Did I mention that I am an optimist?

The one trend that seemed to be everywhere - a focus on near term revenue. There were exceptions, of two types: firstly, the fortunate entrepreneur who had closed a big enough "fund me through the downturn round" and, sadly, a few ostriches with their heads in the sand.

The ones I enjoyed meeting were the "true grit entrepreneurs" who had hustled their way to profitability over many years. They will do great. In the last downturn in 2002, one VC remarked to me that they were only interested in two types of venture. One had been started well before the boom - that makes the ideal birth date today in the 2001 to 2003 era, perhaps 2004. The other was something starting up right now as everything was imploding. Everything in the middle was likely to be riddled with overoptimistic assumptions, expectations of instant wealth without effort. That means start-ups born from 2005 to 2007 had better either have enough capital to sustain their burn for a couple of years, or are profitable or very nearly so.

Oh and one final takeaway. The food at Javits is awful and expensive. You have to walk a few blocks, but on the corner of 38th and Ninth is a really good Italian restaurant and it's really not much more expensive than the Javits chow. Cannot remember the name but 3 blocks west on 38th and you are there. How is that for useful advice on ReadWriteWeb?

Benchmarks

We used the SunSpider benchmark to test the latest version of WebKit against Google's Chrome. The results are quite impressive. WebKit with SquirrelFish Extreme finished the benchmark in 1235ms while Chrome needed 1598ms. The latest production version of FireFox took 3424ms to complete the benchmark. We were not able to test FireFox with TraceMonkey enabled (running the benchmark crashed the browser), but judging from these results, it is clearly a lot slower than both ScquirrelFish Extreme and Chrome.

We also ran the Mozilla affiliated Dromaeo benchmark, which takes a more holistic approach and does not just look at the JavaScript engine. Here, too, SquirrelFish Extreme outperformed Chrome's V8 (4522ms vs. 5206ms).

In case you want to try these benchmarks for yourself, you can download the latest version of WebKit with SquirrelFish Extreme from here.

Competition at Work

When Google launched Chrome, it emphasized that it wanted to bring more competition into this market and to push the development of faster and better browsers. The fact that both the Mozilla and WebKit teams are working so hard to beat Google definitely proves that there is still a lot of room for improvement and that Google's plan is working.

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.

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.