Technorati is Toast: Drops Older Posts from Index
Blogging November 4th, 2007
Technorati’s index seems to be rather forgetful: it does not find blog posts older than six months. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s a new “feature”, or it’s always been like this, and I’m just the last person to notice it.
The only time-limit I’m aware of is calculating Authority, which is based on the revolving 6-month link-counts, but I haven’t found any reference in Technorati’s FAQ to the “shelf-life” of posts in their main index. I’ve only done limited testing, but if indeed this is the case, then Technorati is toast. There’s a lot of value in old posts, and the index that finds them is not Technorati, but Google.
Tags: blog search, Google, google blog search, technorati
Zoli Erdos
Zoli,
Some time ago, I did a detailed examination of Technorati “rules”, trying to understand something of what goes on over there. I recall reading that authority is based on the most recent six-month period. This may be relevant to the issue you raised.
By the way, does Technorati authority-updating generally seem weird, quixotic, and idiosyncratic (ie: buggy and non-intuitive)?
Cheers,
Michael Krigsman
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures
Oh, yes, authority calculation is clearly messed up.
But that’s nothing compared failing the fundamentals of any index: i.e. keeping and finding entries.
Technorati authority is completely messed up – about 3 weeks ago they slapped about +600 on the count, meaning that sites say outside the top 1,200, were moved down to 1,800 – where did all the new sites come in that filled these slots?
Why does it sometimes show 0?
Why does it count spam blogs?
Why does the overall (not authority) count go down?
I stand by my belief that their servers aren’t sync’ed. I also believe that T’rati is becoming another Alexa. Of course for the sites at the top, they don’t care, right?
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.
As far as Allen’s questions:
> Why does it sometimes show 0?
Simple. That’s a bug. And the UI doesn’t degrade gracefully when it occurs. Which is another bug. We know about ‘em, we hate ‘em too, we’ll fix ‘em.
> Why does it count spam blogs?
We don’t intentionally count spam blogs, when we do spam purges they no longer contribute to counts. On a daily basis, we keep a lot of spam out but amidst the new edges of the blogosphere that emerges continuously that we try to cover, spam slips in. And when we catch it, we clean it out.
> Why does the overall (not authority) count go down?
Counts go down if we purge spam or if we pull some data offline (as has been observed with our keyword search index, so it is with our links). Of course authority fluctuates according to the rolling six month window within which we count unique blogs for a site’s authority.
I hope that clears some things up.
thanks,
-Ian
@Ian: “We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling” – in other words – we’re totally messed up and are trying to figure out what to do next. That would be closer to the truth don’t you think?
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