When Technorati announced a new CEO at the beginning of October, many were hoping that the once great Technorati would focus on its core blog search product, a product that had been virtually ignored as the company tried to be all things to everybody, whilst never being the master of one thing.
It might have been wishful thinking.
Zoli Erdos noticed on Monday that he couldn’t find anything in Technorati’s index that was older than 6 months. He emailed them for a response, and a reply from Technorati’s Ian Kallen confirmed it:
We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice :) We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.
The emphasis in the quote is mine but it’s the key line: “most people don’t [sic] notice.” They didn’t notice because they’ve long since switched to using Google BlogSearch or the main index of Google itself. The declining number of people who do regularly use Technorati for search will soon be jumping across to Google as they discover that Technorati is a shallow pool when searching blogs.
If Technorati wants to save money (economization) on their core product so be it, because the long term result will be less traffic for their servers to cope with which will result in data center savings, a good thing given that if rumors are correct they’re quickly running out of funding as well.