Technorati WTF annotates keyword search results

Technorati launched a new search annotation feature today, letting site members briefly explain the rising popularity of a keyword or phrase. The original idea for Technorati WTF came from a few Technorati super fans and an internal hack day over a year ago. Backstory Technorati’s top searches have always been a good way to track popular news themes of the moment. Top searches against a blog search engine often correlate with the news and information the blogosphere is hunting for at any given time. If a web hosting company was offline for an extended period of time, you’d start seeing…

Google Blog Search overtakes Technorati’s market share according to Hitwise

Google Blog Search has overtaken Technorati’s market share in the United States according to LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise. The success of the Google Blog Search is hand-in-hand with Google leveraging existing properties such as Google News and the Google homepage to drive traffic to its new property. Google Blog Search launched in September 2005. Technorati is the green line above, and Google Blog Search is shown in purple. Google Blog Search received a huge traffic boost in October after blog search appeared as an option on Google News pages. Google Blog Search later received a spot on the front page…

Technorati redesigns for the MySpace crowd

Summer is here, meaning it must be time for a new site design from Technorati. The four major Technorati redesigns have each tried to welcome a different type of crowd to the site without alienating existing users. When the site went online in November 2002 the target audience was alpha-bloggers and Linux Journal readers. The company was incorporated in May 2003 and saw its first big redesign in the summer of 2004 focused on the new users visiting the site for real-time information in the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In 2005 the site redesigned again, aiming for…

Technorati raises $10.52 million series C

Update 8/15: PE Wire places the total amount raised at $10.52 million, not $7.6 million as previously reported. Technorati received a $10.52 million investment in June from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. The investment was revealed in a SEC filing on June 22 and made public on Monday. VentureWire reported the investment in its popular newsletter this week. Andreas Stavropoulous of DFJ and Ryan McIntyre of Mobius were previous investors in Technorati and have occupied board seats for close to two years. Technorati took an angel round of investment in the summer of 2003 from a few individuals…

Technorati comScore stats for May

According to comScore Media Metrix numbers cited by the San Francisco Chronicle Google Blog Search had 94,000 unique visitors in May versus 3.3 million unique visitors for Technorati in the same period. Google Blog Search has less than 3% of the number of users as Technorati under those metrics. Either that’s a typo or Google is not very competitive in both blog search or shopping comparison verticals….

comScore breakdown of Technorati traffic

comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati’s visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006. Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites. Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati’s media partners in the comScore analysis….

Technorati introduces microformats search

You can now search for contacts, events, and reviews on Technorati using microformats search. The new feature exposes content from the Technorati index containing special HTML markup within a page or post. Sites such as Upcoming.org and Yahoo! UK Movie Reviews currently markup their content using microformats out of general interest in distributed structured markup but new search engines such as Technorati’s beta search product might send enough traffic to publishers to cause a shift in publishing behavior and templates. Many individual publishers will not notice the change as blog platform providers such as Six Apart’s Vox will collect data…

Technorati Director Richard Ault leaves, joins Metroblogging

Richard Ault just announced he has left Technorati to join Metroblogging, a network of blog sites focused on local content from over 45 cities throughout the world. Richard was Director of Product Marketing at Technorati since January 2004, and one of the first company hires. Metroblogging was co-founded by Jason DeFillippo, who left Technorati in February to focus on the blog network full-time. Richard enjoys skiing and it wouldn’t surprise me if he and his family is working from Lake Tahoe until the snow melts and their house is remodeled. Tags: metroblogging…

Seeking new horizons

I am leaving Technorati to pursue new opportunities. I submitted my resignation letter this morning and I will be a free agent on March 1. I joined Technorati in February 2005 excited about changing the world of weblogs and introducing people to a new kind of search. Almost a year later my passions at work have eroded and it’s time to find new horizons. Valentines Day is the perfect time to rekindle lost flames. The company has accomplished a lot in the past year, emerging from what many people viewed as a commodity space into a market leader. The Alexa…

Google Toolbar API

Google Toolbar version 4 allows developers to create custom buttons using a custom XML descriptor and extended functionality using RDF, RSS, and Atom feeds. The Google toolbar button API can be used to display the latest entry titles from a feed, execute a keyword or URL search, or continuously communicate data at a glance. I created custom buttons for this blog and Technorati. The Google Toolbar can now serve as a feed reader for any feed with a custom Google Toolbar icon. You can even specify in your button file a different icon you would like to display when new…