Technorati is taking some serious heat in the past few weeks from the blogosphere. The search engine has been trashed by no fewer than 5 well-known search industry bloggers.
It would seem an interesting coincidence (though I prefer the phrase “anomalous synchronicity”) that Jason Dowdell’s ferocious debunking of Feedster’s 500 list last week mentioned that a link check using Technorati resulted in a server meltdown.
Dowdell writes:
Coming in at no.. 6 is the NowPublic news site, not the NowPublic main url but rather the news portion of the site. While it looks and smells like a blog, it’s backlink counts in the other blog engines and main search engines don’t jive with it’s top 10 placement on Feedster’s list.
IceRocket: 0 links [117 to homepage]
Technorati: Server Overload – No results
Feedster: 2 links [28k plus to homepage]
BlogPulse: 4 [255 to homepage]
That brief assessment matches up with other reviews of Technorati from a slew of angry blogophiles, ripping the engine a new one to the point of disowning by primetime bloggers Nathan Weinburg, Jason Kottke, Fred Wilson, Ken Norton, and Jason Calacanis.
In his post, “Technorati Is Run By Sadists,” Nathan Weinburg opines:
“I think Technorati likes all the abuse its been getting lately in the blogosphere. If it didn’t, then why would it launch a new feature that is already broken?”
Weinburg was referring to a results page that returned only 4 results instead of 20. This particular peeve has since been addressed. (And Nathan, to be extra snotty and pretentious, if Technorati liked abuse, that would make them masochists, not sadists. Bygones.)
Back on August 19th, Jason Kottke joined the Technorati haters club with:
“That’s it. I’ve had it. No more Technorati. I’ve used the site for, what, a couple of years now to keep track of what people were saying about posts on kottke.org and searching blogs for keywords or current events. During that time, it’s been down at least a quarter of the time (although it’s been better recently), results are often unavailable for queries with large result sets (i.e. this is only going to become a bigger problem as time goes on), and most of the rest of the time it’s slow as molasses.”
Norton, Wilson, and Calacanis welcomed their new brethren to the club, each admitting they abandoned the search engine months ago.
“I stopped using Technorati a few months ago, not because the results are spam-infested and out of date (which they are) but because the site is just way too slow. No way am I going to wait 15 seconds for results in the world of Google. (I was also slightly flabbergasted by their Godzilla-barfs-a-box-of-Crayolas site redesign but that’s another problem),” wrote Norton.
Calacanis didn’t hold any punches in his blog post with the very direct title “Technorati Worthless.”
“I’ve been complaining about how worthless the results from Technorati are for the past six months (at least)Amazing how quickly the mighty have fallen. At a conference last year half the screen in the audience seemed to be on Technorati. Now, I do my canned technorati searches and I see nothing but items from a year ago and spam. Ugh.”
And finally in our dog pile on Technorati, we have Fred Wilson pining the dissolution of his relationship.
“I cannot promote an empty parking lot as if it is something of value. I’ve watched over the past weeks as content rich blogs have disappeared from Technorati results and spam blogs seem invulnerably present. I’ve also documented certain TAGS that previously had valid results and now show ZERO results,” wrote Wilson before declaring Technorati worthless for the past nine months.
