Improbulus, one of my favorite bloggers, is trying to map out the Technorati genome and cure the indexing problems that she and others, including me, have experienced at one time or another.
Reading her post got me thinking about Technorati and the challenges facing it as it becomes the backbone of the blogosphere. Nothing in this post is in any way a criticism of Improbulus- she is only addressing her version of the issues I have already faced and wrestled with. These are just my current conclusions based on my experiences and what I have read about those of Improbulus and others.
I’m certain someone at Technorati will get her indexing problems worked out, because they always do. Granted, their email support is not going to win any awards, but the problems generally get fixed and Dave Sifry takes an active role in identifying and responding to problems.
Dave and Craig Newmark are carrying the banner as far as hip and proactive CEOs go. If I were some young guy just getting started, this blog would be devoted to convincing one of those guys to hire me. Proactive and involved CEOs set the tone for the entire company (I’ll write more on this another time).
Though I’m not on the payroll, I am still the self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati. As such, I have to believe a couple of things where Technorati is concerned:
1) The engineers behind their hardware and software have had to deal with scale, both rate and amount, in a big, big way. That simply cannot be completely planned for and there’s simply no way to do it without hiccups and interruptions along the way. I remember the deluge of scaling problems we had when we first went live with ACCBoards.Com and our scale then was a drop in the ocean compared to what Technorati is facing.
2) Given the foregoing, they are doing one hell of a job keeping things running, improving reliability and adding new features.
3) Technorati continues to be, by far, the most accurate at finding tagged content, inbound links and other information bloggers and blog readers want and need. I use Google Blog Search and Technorati to search for content and to monitor my inbound links and mentions. Technorati does a better job, hands down. It shows more content faster than Google or any other search engine or database I’ve tried.
So while I have blogged here many times about the problems I’ve had getting indexed and while those problems are very frustrating at times, Technorati is doing about as much as can be expected given the enormous task it has undertaken.
Technorati is still a baby company. There’s lots to be done, but on the whole I’m pretty impressed with what they’ve accomplished so far.
And Dave, while you’re here, how about hiring that new spokesman I recommended?
Newsome.Org 