Jason Kottke is complaining about Technorati on his blog. I think, at the end of the day, he’s absolutely right. I had hoped at some point to be able to use Technorati’s data and technology for this research project I have going on at ESPN.com, but quite frankly the data has been so inconsistent that I’ve been forced to start looking around.
I’ve been doing a comparison of PubSub and Technorati and just want to second Kottke’s observations. PubSub has more results, seems a bit more timely, and is consistent. Technorati, well, when they’re working works alright, but seems pretty limited in their functionality. The main limitation of PubSub is that they don’t expose traditional search functionality: you can’t look back at what people have been saying, you can only get notified in the future about posts that match your terms. It’s great for watching your blog or for links to ESPN.com, say, but sucks when you’re trying to research blog reaction to the latest speech by Bush or blog reviews of the Mighty Mouse.
Just one other thought. The problems all started with the redesign of the site, really. It used to be hit or miss but nowhere near as bad as it is now. My Sports Buzz posts on FM suck now because clicking “Read Blogs” more often than not gets you an error message rather than actual blog entries. What good is the fancy redesign if the basic functionality is broken?
Especially since it seems like a parlor trick when it actually does work. I think they cache the results to successful queries which means that if it’s a common search or a common tag, you’ll get results. Do anything the least bit unusual and you’ll get an error page. So, it’s unclear how timely the results actually are… I do notice that the tag queries seem more reliable than regular search terms, but I suspect that it’s easier to index and catalog them (the users have already done the hard work of choosing which words to associate the post with…
Update: Have to second Kottke’s note about IceRocket. I’ve been playing around with them for the past hour or so and they’re pretty solid. On the surface, they’re competing with Technorati on what I see as key features (allowing users to directly ping them rather than relying on the blo.gs cloud) and with link counts (what Technorati calls authority), and some other details. The implementation of “linking blogs” looks especially interesting and I’ll be implementing this on FM soon, I think.
August 20th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
Technorati - The Internet Has Spoken
Technorati is finally getting the attention it deserves. Hopefully to disappear and be replaced by something much better. Over at Kottke, the obivious was pointed out brilliantly. FatMixx says the same thing and more about using Technorati as a…
August 21st, 2005 at 11:14 pm
I’m glad you seem to like the service we’re providing you at PubSub. We’ve been hearing more and more from people that they *really* want us to start letting them access our retrospective search engine instead of just the prospective system that we expose now. If we keep getting this pressure, it is probably something that we’ll do. The problem is that doing retrospective search is a pretty well known problem and not one that we’ll be able to do much better than anyone else. There really isn’t much mystery behind doing retrospective search any more. We’ve wanted to concentrate our efforts on solving the hard problem of prospective search. Nonetheless, we seem to be getting control of that problem so we may just surprise you by exposing our retrospective engine in the future… Stay tuned.
bob wyman