post

Technorati is Toast: Drops Older Posts from Index

TechnoratiJPG 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.smile_omg

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.

Comments

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

  4. 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

  5. @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?

  6. over the course of 3-4 mos my techno authority has dropped almost -40!

  7. […….]Terrific post, Ross! Very interesting to actually see with your screen grabs how those sites have evolved. acai berry cleanse
    Keep up the great work and remember us little people when you take over Australia. 🙂 [….]

Trackbacks

  1. […] I first noticed I could not find posts older than 6 months, I had doubts if I tested enough,  and even if I did, was the issue system-wide, and “by […]

  2. […] Erdos noticed on Monday that he couldn’t find anything in Technorati’s index that was older than 6 months. He […]

  3. […] Erdos noticed on Monday that he couldn’t find anything in Technorati’s index that was older than 6 months. He […]

  4. […] Erdos noticed on Monday that he couldn’t find anything in Technorati’s index that was older than 6 months. He […]

  5. […] effect what Technorati is apparently doing according to an email from Ian Kallen at Technorati to Zoli Erdos who first noticed that anything older than six months was missing from Technorati’s index. While Ian shrugs off […]

  6. […] According to Zoli (with hat tip to Techcrunch), blog search engine Technorati is silently scaling back its index and only returning results from the last six months: 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. […]

  7. […] Zoli Erdos s’est rĂ©cemment rendu compte qu’il ne parvenait plus Ă  retrouver dans l’index Technorati du contenu datant de plus d…. […]

  8. […] 6, 2007 in google, spinn3r, tailrank, technorati Looks like Technorati is trimming their index back a bit down to content less than six months. We’re in the midst of some economization, performance […]

  9. […] week we learned that Technorati has taken blog posts older than six months out of their online index claiming that […]

  10. […] of Nov. Technorati users report losing content older than 6 months.  The Technorati response was that they’re “in the midst of some […]

  11. […] technorati. Of course I’m not the first one to realize that. At the begining of the month Zoli Erdos already noticed he couldn’t find anything in Technorati’s index that was older than 6 months. […]

  12. […] effect what Technorati is apparently doing according to an email from Ian Kallen at Technorati to Zoli Erdos who first noticed that anything older than six months was missing from Technorati’s index. While Ian shrugs off […]

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