When I first started blogging almost three years ago now Technorati was a must sign up for service. In just about all the tips and hints you read about blogging Technorati was right up there in the top 10. Over the years though it has become a total rollercoaster ride with many suggesting that Technorati had become irrelevant. Some bloggers like myself even went to the point of not even caring anymore what the company was doing. Technorati badges that once proudly displayed rising Authority rankings began to fade away from blog sidebars around the web.
I had long been a believer in Technorati and wrote about them; the good and the bad as I saw it, a lot over the past couple of years, but there came a point where the bad was just outweighing the good. While some will point to things like their index becoming polluted by splogs this wasn’t the only problem plaguing them. As Louis Gray said in a post today
To laud Technorati is going against the flow, to say the very least. The once-omnipresent blog search engine has practically been reduced to a state of irrelevancy, thanks to inconsistent uptime, odd product launches and withdrawals, nonsensical redesigns, executive turnover and aggressive competition from others – primarily Google Blog Search.
Now Louis in his usual fair way does go on to say that due to some recent improvements he is willing to give them another chance when it comes to his blog searching needs – I’m still not so inclined. For me it is going to take a lot more than just a brief improvement in search results before I consider investing time in Technorati.
However if what Ian Kallen talked about on his blog today is any indication we may all be looking to Technorati in the same way that Louis is. For those of you not familiar with the name, Ian Kallen leads the Core Services engineering group and is responsible in architecting the backend to support the search aspects of the company. It is a pretty safe bet to assume that when he has something to say about what is happening with the company from the area users are interested in – the results – it is worth listening to.
So what is happening and is it enough to bring former customers back the fold?
Well other than the opening statement that a lot of changes are afoot at Technorati we got the rundown on the next version of the company’s web crawler and how it is going to vastly improve the index. As well Ian lets us know that they have made great progress in the battle against splogs
Another change that we’ve made is to the legacy assumption that everything that pings is a blog. That assumption proved to be increasingly untenable as the ping meme spread amongst those who didn’t really understand the difference between some random page and a blog, nefarious publishers (spammers) and other perpetrators of spings. Over 90% of the pings hitting Technorati are rejected outright because they’ve been identified as invalid pings. A large portion of the remainder are later determined to be invalid but we now have a rigorous system in place for filtering out the noise. We’ve reduced the spam level considerably (as mentioned in a prior post). For instance, there’s a whole genre of splogs that are pornography focused (hardcore pictures, paid affiliate links, etc) that previously plagued our data; now we’ve eliminated a lot of that nonsense from the index.
While that is great to hear it is something that we have heard before in the past as well so one can only hope I guess that time will tell. Don’t get me wrong I really want Technorati to come back with all guns blazing and knock our collective socks off because at the heart of I think Technorati an perform a valuable service in blog search.
I look forward to what Technorati has planned and while I might not be jumping up and down in excitement I do hope they manage to make their way back into the hearts of bloggers.
