Blog search engine Technorati, which was simultaneously pitching a sale through Montgomery & Co. as well as a new venture round, raised $7.5 million in a fourth round of financing according to a regulatory filing. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation. I spoke with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra this evening, who confirms that a venture round has been closed and says that the company will make an announcement next week that includes more information. It’s also clear that the company is refocusing its business. We believe they are launching a blogger-focused advertising network based on documents we published in February. The company has, however, considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. We’ll know more next week. CrunchBase Information Technorati Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Technorati founder Dave Sifry, who left the company a little over a year ago, is launching a new company called Offbeat Guides this morning into private beta. Sifry’s blog post on the launch is here. Think Lonely Planet travel guides, except they are created on the fly from Internet data sources, customized to you personally and then delivered via PDF instantly or (a color printed version) by mail within 4 business days. Data comes from open sources like wikipedia, wikitravel, Flickr and Google Maps, as well as proprietary sources that have cut deals with the company. And you can create a guide for virtually anywhere in the world – they have 30,000 or so destinations today, and will be adding regional versions in the futures (“France” or “Napa Valley” for example). Users can add or remove sections that appeal to them (museums, for example, or walking tours), and the guides include things like up to date weather forecasts, events that are going on during your visit, current exchange rates, etc. If you tell it where you are staying, the guide will include walking maps based on that location. An example guide that I created is embedded below. The guides aren’t free – a printed version costs $25, PDF (which can be printed at home or downloaded to a laptop or Kindle) is $10. Unsatisfied customers can get a full refund, the site says, and keep the guide. Offbeat Guides raised a small seed round of financing (a “few hundred thousand dollars” says Sifry) in February 2008. The first 250 people to use the code “TechCrunch” can get into the beta immediately, along with coupons for two free books. Also below is an interview with Sifry about Offbeat Guides from last week (Thanks to Michael Pick for the video branding work). And see our coverage of Nile Guide, which is also allowing users to create personalized travel itineraries. http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F959084%3Freferrer%3Dblip%2Etv%26source%3D1&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=657044&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Paris.pdf.swf&showrelated=0&showotherdocs=0&showstats=0&enableFullScreen=1Paris Travel Guide By Offbeat Guides – Find Documents CrunchBase Information Offbeat Guides Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Blog search engine Technorati was days away from merging with blog network b5media when the whole deal blew up earlier this week, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. Technorati has been searching for a new strategy ever since it appointed CEO Richard Jalichandra last October. It was recently trying to raise an additional round of financing, and pitching venture capitalists that it could turn itself into a blog advertising network and/or even pursue a blog roll-up strategy. The talks with Toronto-based b5media (they’re big in Canada) indicate that it is taking the blog roll-up idea more seriously than we previously thought. If the merger with b5media had gone through, Technorati would have gained a network of 340 blogs. One of the slides in the pitch deck Technorati was showing potential investors (shown above) outlines how a roll-up strategy could be combined with an ad network. Technorati would use its search engine to promote owned-and-operated blogs. It would sell ads using its own sales force instead of third-party ad networks for an “immediate 30-50% revenue bump” and sell across its network. According to our source, the deal with b5media never went through, though, because of personality conflicts between the CEOs and a lack of transparency on Technorati’s part during due diligence. At least that is how the b5media side sees it. Prior to its dalliance with Technorati, b5media was itself trying to raise another venture round that would put a $20 million valuation on the company. But there were no takers. So b5media started talking to potential merger partners or acquirers (including at one point Federated Media Publishing). A combination with Technorati could have made both Technorati and b5media more appealing to later-stage venture investors. But now the two need to keep looking for other options before their time (and cash) runs out. CrunchBase Information Technorati b5media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Trade magazine Blogger & Podcaster Magazine is expanding into advertising with their own blog advertising network. The Blogger & Podcaster Network (BPN) will target “the B,C,D & E listers who have smaller and often more niche audiences.” Blogger & Podcaster have retained investment bank The Riderwood Group to obtain expansion funding for the network. Those signing up to BPN will get promotion in the mainstream media through The Blogger & Podcaster Guide and revenue from advertising and other revenue generating services. The obvious comparison for the network is Technorati’s recently revealed advertising network. Although both target the long tail, BPN would be one of the most different pitches I’ve ever seen in 6 years covering this space. To be a part of BPN you have to be listed in The Blogger & Podcaster Guide which costs $5 a month due to a new deal with USA Today (it was previously $49.95/ month). On top of the advertising opportunities there is also an affiliate program for selling memberships to the guide, pretty standard fare. This is where it gets very interesting: members will have “access to healthcare.” Exactly what level of healthcare provided wasn’t specified, with Blogger & Podcaster simply saying that “this is a big issue for bloggers/podcasters looking to leave their day jobs and go full-time.” Ultimately the devil will be in the detail but immediately every US based blogger who blogs for a living is going to want to look at whatever they are offering; even if it’s a basic healthcare package it’s a whole lot better than having no healthcare coverage in country that (unlike most of the rest of the western world) does not provide universal healthcare. → Read More
CNET is reporting that tech-focused advertising network Federated Media (which sells advertising on our behalf) is looking for a new round of financing. CNET is basing this partially on our previous report that they hired investment bank Savvian to represent them after they turned down a $100 million acquisition offer, plus a new source that says the company is looking at term sheets now. From what we hear, Federated Media is looking at both financing and new buyout offers, but wants a valuation way beyond the $100 million floated to them last year. Founder John Battelle is said to be looking for more of a Glam-like valuation, in the $400+ million range. Glam has a similar business model to Federated Media, but focuses on womens sites. Glam also guarantees significant revenue to its partners, which resulted in a loss last year of $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue. Federated Media doesn’t guarantee revenue, and is reportedly profitable (they better be, with how much of our revenue they keep). Federated Media is reportedly generating gross revenues in excess of $2 million per month, and they keep 40% of that after the split to partners. It’s unlikely the company will get buyout offers in the price range Battelle is looking for, so a new financing is likely. But part of me wonders why they’re doing this at all. A new financing means a bigger valuation, which means they need a much higher price down the road when they do eventually sell. And with competitors springing up all over the place, margins can take a hit. Perhaps Federated Media intends to take the Glam approach and go in the red for the sake of growth and begin to guarantee revenues. That’s a slippery slope, but it may also get Battelle his payday. CrunchBase Information Federated Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in its going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions. First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising – their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches. What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience. That change foreshadows the upcoming shift – which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network. Advertising networks are popular right now – Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer. Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM. Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively. Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product. Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, → Read More
Former Technorati CEO David Sifry has launched Web Hot or Not?, a Hot or Not site for websites. Sifry left Technorati in August 2007. For the one person reading this who doesn’t know how Hot or Not style sites work, the site presents a website which must be scored between 1 or 10, 1 being not, 10 being hot. MG Seigler writes that “Quite frankly I’m shocked it has taken this long for someone to come out with this.” I like MG, so perhaps its the intense jetlag talking when I write what the? Sure, on the surface it’s an obvious idea, but the reason why its taken this long for a site like this to appear is because the idea isn’t a very good one. David Sifry hints that it might be a lark, and if that is the case then we’ll let it slide and recommend people take a look, it should provide seconds, maybe even a minute or two of interest. If, as Sifry suggests “Who knows where it’ll go” (meaning it might take off), I’m off to buy alcohol. Cheers. Update: you can vote for Web Hot or Not on Web Hot or Not here. Update 2: another site in this space that does it in a better way is CommandShift3. It’s a not a direct Hot or Not clone but it allows you to rate sites. Hot or Not Designs is another one. → Read More
At first glance, blog search as a category is oversaturated. Ok, at second glance, too. Not only did Google enter the market directly in late 2005, they’ve also increased the rate that they index blogs and other regularly updated sites for core Google search. TechCrunch, for example, is now indexed multiple times per day by Google, and new posts are often available in a normal Google search within minutes of posting. Most people today say the best blog search engine is, simply, Google.com. And there are many competitors. The Comscore chart below shows the relative traffic of the major ones – Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Sphere and IceRocket. Feedster is gone, although there are additional smaller engines like Zuula and Blogdigger as well. Every one of those companies is U.S. based (note that Paris-based Wikio has blog search as well as a Digg-like service). Now Europe will have it’s own blog search engine – Twingly. I met Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. Their focus, he says, will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. Twingly’s search engine hasn’t launched yet, although I do have a screen shot of what the home page will eventually look like: Twingly already has a product – a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver – mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs. The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed → Read More
Technorati made changes this week to the way it counts inbound links for purposes of determining its blog rankings. This had some effect on the Technorati 100 list. Technorati was previously counting all links made to blogs on a given domain. So links to, for example, chinese.engadget.com were also counting towards engadet.com, even though they are separate blogs. They are no longer counting these links. Engadget took the biggest hit, losing more than a quarter of their 30,000+ unique links over the last six months. They are still the top blog; however, no. 2 Gizmodo is within striking distance, whereas before they were not even close. TechCrunch was affected, dropping from no. 2 to no. 3 behind Gizmodo (our France, UK and Japan blogs are on subdomains). Even so, the changes seem appropriate. Technorati VP Engineering Dorion Carroll explains the change here. There is still a massive amount of fraud links counted by Technorati in their Top Blogs list. I’m hoping that their newfound focus will lead to further changes. CrunchBase Information Technorati Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (WordPress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, WordPress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: → Read More
Technorati has a brand new CEO, and he’s been busy in his short time with the company. Today Technorati is relaunching, with a new core focus on bloggers. Last week I saw a demo of the new products, which CEO Richard Jalichandra and VP Engineering Dorion Carroll say reflect the company’s re-dedication to their core audience: bloggers and advertisers. Technorati Front Page The recently changed home page, just three months old, is gone. In place of the streaming blog posts is a news aggregator that, like TechMeme and the New York Times’ Blogrunner, use linking behavior on news sites to determine headline news. Blogs and mainstream media are separated. Blog headlines are on the left; MSM is on the right. Below each headline is a cluster of blogs that have linked to and discussed the story. The news aggregator complements Technorati’s core strength as a blog search engine, Carroll says. Sometimes users want to search. Other times, they want to discover and browse. The news aggregator helps them see what bloggers and journalists are talking about right now, all over the world. The topics feature that Technorati launched in September (front page, business, entertainment, lifestyle, politics, sports, technology) is now highlighted directly via navigation tabs on the home page. This is something Technorati experimented with in the past (see our 2005 coverage of Technorati Explore, which never made it out of the lab), but it never dedicated meaningful resources (or the home page) to finding news patterns in blog posts. Now, the company is dedicating those resources to making it work. Blogger Central and Today In Photos In addition to the Front Page news aggregator, Technorati is making two other big additions to the site. The first is a resource page for bloggers called, fittingly, Blogger Central. It shows blog posts about blogging (clustered using the news aggregator engine) as well as popular blog tags at any given time. The page also has top blogs by links and popularity. The second, pictured left, is a new product called Today In Photos. Like AOL’s new Mgnet product, it shows popular news via the photos and images included in those news items. People like to see and click on images. This page will show them what’s hot, visually. Users can reach the page by clicking on the grouping of images on the bottom of every page. A Fresh Start The new products → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information Technorati Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I was hoping that the changing of the guard at Technorati would mean that the company would learn to become somewhat humble. Early signs say that isn’t the case. In a Wired interview, incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra did note that the company has some challenges ahead (in reality, the only challenge is to find a buyer, fast). But he also describes Techmeme, which has a single employee, never raised capital and yet has beaten Technorati at everything it has chosen to do, merely as “a great little site.” He also says Techmeme is not nearly as embedded in the blog community as Technorati: WN: What’s your take on TechMeme’s leaderboard? RJ: It’s a great little site and there are a lot of cool things on there, but when I look at the assets we’re sitting on it’s clear that we’re doing something different. They don’t track 100 million blogs and they’re not nearly as embedded in blog community. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in terms of how deep we can go, I feel like we’re in a pretty good place. Jalichandra may learn the hard way that belittling competitors doesn’t create loads of goodwill for his company. He would be far better off simply stating the truth: that Technorati managed to burn through $20 million in capital and has created little more than the second most popular blog search engine after Google blogsearch (and with how quickly Google is indexing blogs and other news sites, many loyal blog searchers simply search google.com today anyway). They missed huge opportunities – Techmeme (rapidly passionate readers), MyBlogLog (social network around blogs) and Sphere’s related search product (stole Technorati partners like WSJ and Washington Post) are all opportunities that Technorati just plain missed, and shouldn’t have. All of those “great little companies” could have added up to one big company, and Technorati could have been it. So what is Jalichandra going to focus on as CEO (the real answer is selling the company, but he can’t say that). Here’s his answer: WN: What can we expect to see from Technorati in the next year with you at the helm? RJ: We’re really centered on trying to create a wholly unique media experience and improving our properties. Our big thing is going to be working on the advertising side of things to connect brands to the idea of global conversation that we strive for. → Read More
Technorati today announced its search for a new CEO was over, with Richard Jalichandra being appointed to the role, some 6 weeks since Technorati’s founding CEO David Sifry stepped down and 5 months since it was publicly confirmed that Technorati was seeking a new CEO. Prior to joining Technorati, Jalichandra held roles at Exponential Interactive, Fox Interactive Media and IGN Entertainment. Most recently Jalichandra was Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Battery Ventures, an advisory board member at MyYearbook.com and Pixsy, and as an M&A and strategy consultant for several other startups. The once great Technorati has floundered in recent years as attempts to broaden its product offering resulted in its core blog search product suffering for lack of development and support, all at the same time that Google Blog Search came to the fore. More recently, Technorati started downsizing staff as the approx. $20 million raised over three rounds started to dry up. As I’ve noted previously, I’ve always had a soft spot for Technorati. When I started blogging in 2002, the only way of tracking the blogosphere was Technorati and perhaps to a lesser extent Daypop, which was never as good. Jalichandra’s challenge will be to focus Technorati on achievable goals, whilst purging the company of the excesses of the past. Technorati’s failed Digg clone WTF (the most unfortunate acronym I’ve ever seen) should be the first to go. Core competencies in blog search, in particular with focus on filtering results from spam blogs must be a priority. Given the new competition from Techmeme on the popular blog list side, a more frequently updating service from Technorati should be on the to-do list, with perhaps more contextual lists; say popular blogs by vertical and filtered results based on link age, for example link popularity over 1, 3, 6, and 12 months, then maybe an all-time popular list would be nice. If you’ve got any advice for Jalichandra on how Technorati can rise from the endangered list, let him know in the comments. → Read More
Update: The leaderboard has launched. See it here. Blog search engine Technorati’s founding CEO is gone, its traffic party has ended and its core search functionality is under long term fire from competitors like Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere (among others). Constant strategic shifts haven’t helped much either. But Technorati still has one stronghold left – it controls the definitive, editorially unbiased list of top blogs. The list is based on unique incoming blog links over the previous six months. More links = a higher position on the list. To get a top 100 spot, a blog currently needs about 3,700 unique links. But links from other blogs may no longer be the best indicator of the popularity of a blog, particularly today when blog links can be obtained by simply opening up the checkbook and paying. Also, Technorati clearly counts spam and other blogs, which can have a significant impact on rankings. That’s a statement that will be hotly debated. But tomorrow bloggers will have a new top 100 list to aim for – the Techmeme Leaderboard. The list will be created based on the blogs that created the most headlines on Techmeme over the previous thirty days (so it will change frequently). TechMeme has become the definitive site for tech blogging news, and its sister sites Memeorandum (political news), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) and BallBug (baseball news) hold a similar esteem in their markets. It’s about time founder Gabe Rivera started to release some of the great statistical data he’s been collecting since launching the original site in 2005. To be exact, top blogs will be ranked on presence – “the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.” Discussion links are not taken into consideration – only full headlines are counted. I think this is a much better way of ranking the very top blogs than the Technorati approach. Technorati has deep flaws, for reasons stated above. Techmeme, by contrast, has zero spam and tends to mirror what the tech blogosphere is writing about perfectly. I am somewhat biased, however, as TechCrunch is currently in the no. 1 spot, whereas Technorati only ranks it no. 4. Also, our sister site CrunchGear is ranked no. 28 on the Techmeme Leaderboard list. Look for this sometime tomorrow, and hopefully we’ll see leaderboards for the other Techmeme sites soon, too. Until then, check out the screen shot → Read More
Technorati has announced the launch of Technorati Topics, a live river of news stream that delivers a moving list of blog posts. It replaces the just relaunched Technorati home page. Technorati’s Dorion Carroll said that the changes were due to user feedback on “how [Technorati] should organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers be found….In particular, [there were] a lot of blog posts asking us to build what bloggers want.” It would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and some may suggest that the move today is a case of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Technorati has lurched from one crisis to another this year, losing a CEO and downsizing as it attempted to be everything to everybody whilst failing to deliver a killer product any vertical. On the other hand, as a long time Technorati user it’s good to see Technorati going back to its roots as a blogging search engine. There is still some work to do in terms of improving the indexing, but in terms of focus Technorati Topics is at least a step in the right direction. → Read More
We’ve all known that blog search engine Technorati and videocasting site PodTech weren’t doing particularly well: that both companies were conducting CEO searches. But today the bloodletting became real. PodTech CEO John Furrier is out. James McCormick, the COO, steps up to the CEO position. The company also announced that 1938 Media is no longer partnering with them, which is a real loss. Technorati is a bit more complicated. Dave Sifry, the founder, is no longer CEO. And surprisingly, he is no longer an employee with the Company at all. And no one is replacing him yet. Sifry said previously that he’d stay with the company: “I expect to resume a more active role in product development.” Today the message was the opposite: “I would go ahead and transition to the board exclusively.” Teresa Malo, CFO, Dorion Carroll Vice President of Engineering and Derek Gordon, Vice President of Marketing, now jointly run the company. Sifry’s last blog post as CEO of the company was representative of his entire tenure – vague and cold. Layoffs also occurred today but Sifry didn’t mention them until the end. The blog post sort of went like this: me….me…me…and oh yeah we layed off eight people. Sifry also refers to himself as a “great leader” in the fourth paragraph of his post. How about a different approach? Perhaps a blog post lamenting the layoffs and the disruption in people’s lives would have been in order. And then an ending saying that he takes responsibility for the problems which led to this and will be stepping down, too. To be fair to Dave, some people who’ve worked with him say he cares a lot about the wellbeing of his employees, and will go above and beyond the norm for them when needed. That side of him doesn’t come out very well in his blog posts. But writing an “I’m leaving” post is certainly difficult to do. I’m not saying I think the post was entirely appropriate, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt to some extent. Update: David Dalka thinks Technorati’s Google SEO tactics may have accelerated Sifry’s departure. And it does look like the Technorati traffic party has ended – Technorati no longer shows up in the search results for the terms I mentioned in that post. → Read More
Recent Comscore stats show Technorati continuing to surge in traffic, more than tripling since a year ago. Founder and CEO Dave Sifry recently mentioned about this staggering growth in a blog post. Technorati’s internal numbers showed massive growth early this year. They had nine million unique visitors in March, up from 3.5 million two months prior. And page views, he said, were up 141% over the previous three months. There just isn’t any plausible explanation for traffic gains like these. Except that the company has perfected their search engine optimization approach, particularly with regard to Google. For the last several months, Technorati “tag” results have risen steadily in Google search rankings. Technorati is now linked in the top few results for thousands of high-volume search terms: See MySpace (6th), Facebook (4th), Wikipedia (4th), etc. The reason these terms are appearing high in Google search results is because Technorati was synonymous with tagging, and most tagging plugins for blogs default their tag links back to Technorati. Each day, tens of thousands of blogs have multiple links back to Technorati; one for each tag they use to describe their post. All of those links create massive search engine relevance and drive Technorati results higher in search results for commonly tagged words. But there is a big problem looming for Technorati: their tag results pages are essentially search results. And Google doesn’t like to show search results within search results. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently wrote a post called “Search Results in Search Results” on his personal blog. He says that Google generally looks to exclude search results from their web search index; and they suggest to other search engines that they include a “disallow” note in their robots.txt file to let Google know that they results shouldn’t be indexed. Google wants to keep people from clicking more than once to get where they want to go. Having them do a search on Google, and then being directed to Technorati to see a tag search, is counter to that goal. But Technorati doesn’t disallow tag search within their robots.txt file. Compare Technorati’s file to what Google uses for their own blog search engine. Technorati will argue that tag search isn’t normal search, and so the results should be indexed. But Google does not index tag results pages for its own YouTube property. Technorati tags are directly analogous to YouTube tags, → Read More
All that new traffic from the relaunch, and the site goes down for the count. Or maybe it really is “scheduled maintenance,” in the middle of the day, at peak traffic times. I love Technorati, even when they lie to me. → Read More
Blog search engine Technorati made significant changes to its data architecture and user interface this evening. CEO Dave Sifry outlined the details on his personal blog. The changes, Sifry says, are largely in response to Technorati’s changing user base – more and more mainstream Internet users are using the service. This is also a clear move by Technorati away from blog search, although many of the media search features have been around for a while. It may be an acknowledgment that they can’t beat Google Blogsearch over the long run, or it may be a strategy to go after a larger potential market for time sensitive content. Or both. The most noticeable visual change is to the home page, which has been completely redesigned (see image above). Technorati has also eliminated search types (keyword search, tag search and blog directory search) in favor of a single search box. All search results are returned in the format technorati.com/tag/query (example) and show results from blogs, videos, photos and audio files all on the first result page. Users can drill down into vertical results via tabs. Users who want only blog search results can now go to search.technorati.com. All signs are that Technorati is continuing to look for a replacement to Sifry, the founding CEO, and rumors that the company is looking for a buyer persist despite denials from the company. → Read More
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