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Blog search news, trends, and analysis related to search provider Technorati.

  1. Jan31

    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.

    Technorati top searches WTF

    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 their name in the top searches. If there's a celebrity breakup, freak out, or skirt lifting it usually makes its way to the top searches. If Apple releases a new product...well, you get the point.

    Sitting around the Technorati offices someone might blurt out "WTF did Paris Hilton do now?" as a mass of searchers look for the phone numbers of celebrities, night vision camera footage, or Tinkerbell's latest wardrobe. Back then most Technorati employees sat in the same room, and someone probably already knew why Paris Hilton, Dreamhost, or Wikipedia was an especially popular search that day and would answer the proclamation of puzzlement almost right away.

    Technorati's frequent users noticed the puzzling top searches as well. A few bloggers summarized the top news of the day by annotating Technorati's top searches on their own blog and linking to the site where the news broke or wherever had the best coverage of the day. When big news happened, such as the London bombings or Hurricane Katrina, Technorati created a special search result page with the familiar reverse chronological view of posts and a special sidebar summarizing the latest news on the topic and top sources of information.

    At an internal hack day a little over a year ago a few employees decided to add these search explanations to any search result, letting a Technorati member help other searchers add context and find top sources a bit quicker. These search explanations were used internally by Technorati staff to annotate a few top searches and clue a few other people in to the searched news of the day as quickly as possible. I believe former employees Derek, Jason, and possibly Ben worked on the original hack but it's been a while and there was beer involved during the hack presentation, so those brain cells have since faded.

    Technorati WTF feature

    Barak Obama WTF on Technorati

    The new Technorati WTF feature adds few useful features to the original hack by letting multiple people annotate a search and searchers viewing the page vote on the explanation and information they found more useful. The search explanations are usually tied to a topic of the moment, explaining for example why the iPhone or Nintendo Wii is especially popular today, tracking new news and developments even when a search term has long-term popularity.

    Technorati WTF is a mini-blog post aimed at a specific audience. Bloggers who used to try and summarize the top search results on their own blog and attract the attention of searchers can now add a note and possibly gain a reputation directly on the Technorati search result page. It's a OneBox-like placement for the knowledge search item best matching your query.

    I like the new feature and I think it will save people some time as they track the top news stories and sources of the day. I'm surprised the final product name was Internet slang term WTF under the family-friendly "where's the fire?" rebrand, but I suppose that will just be an inside joke among geeks.

    Disclosure: I own a piece of Technorati

  2. Dec28

    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.

    Hitwise market share Technorati Google Blog Search late 2006

    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 of Google.com, gaining the top spot on the expanded "more" services menu.

    Google homepage showing search dropdown

    The dreaded Google search box or Google OneBox integration can be a death blow to many Internet startups. Google Blog Search is now better able to tap into Google's over 108 million unique users in the United States, delivering a targeted and very focused index.

    Age breakdown of US visitors to Technorati and Google Blog Search

    I was especially surprised by Hitwise's estimate of the age breakdown of Google Blog Search and Technorati. Google Blog Search is most popular with users age 18-24 while Technorati is most popular with users 35-44. The Hitwise age group breakdowns are similar to comScore numbers from June placing 36% of Technorati's users between 35 and 54 years of age even though 30% of Technorati's traffic was from MySpace at the time.

  3. Jul24

    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 a more mainstream audience and better organization of new features such as keyword search and tags.

    The MySpace demographic is now makes up 30% or more of Technorati's user base and the new site design seems to be aimed at a younger crowd with its candy colors and increased use of icons and small images.

    Unlike many other search sites Technorati's link structure seems designed to keep people within its pages. A linked blog post title on the site homepage points to a URL search result and not the author's original entry for example. Tag pages are no longer a snapshot of multiple sources across the web such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Furl, placing Flickr results behind a tab.

    I like the breadcrumbs at the top of each search result page and the inclusion of tool pages in the footer. The redesigned "Discover" pages look nice, except for the pixelated feed icon in the title bars.

    The big problem for Technorati and many other sites is trying to help users consume the vast amount of choices and information available. When Technorati had fewer features it was easy enough to highlight each option and the latest data on the front page of the site. As the number of data exploration options on the site increases I expect more interface tweaks to help users make sense of it all. Hopefully Technorati will take some ideas from the new Yahoo! homepage and shuffle personalization and section highlighting across the site based on usage statistics.

  4. Jul13

    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 including Esther Dyson and Joi Ito and used the money to turn a side-project into a full-time business. In August 2004 Technorati took additional funding and board members, investing in servers and a new colocation center while bringing on additional staff members, growing the company from 5 people and what I call "the back of the liquor store colo" to over 30 people with servers hosted in a former tank factory.

    The latest round will most likely be used to continue Technorati's growth in hardware and personnel as the blogosphere expands and Technorati attempts to index it all and discover new content sources overseas.

    If you are interested in details of Technorati's past funding processes check out the 106 Miles talk by founder and CEO Dave Sifry from February 2005. Dave specifically mentions the VC process about 34 minutes into the talk. You won't hear much from Technorati about the round since Dave likens funding announcements to proclaiming your latest levels of debt.

  5. Jul08

    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.

  6. Jun07

    comScore breakdown of Technorati traffic

    Technorati comScore graph

    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's largest age demographic is 35-54 year olds (36%).

    I've seen many instances of the "MySpace effect" on the growth of online startups. YouTube, Userplane, and Slide are just a few companies benefiting from easy integration with MySpace and its millions of users.

  7. May31

    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 in special input fields for publication as hReview or other specialized markup.

    Technorati's indexing of distributed structured data described by microformats available on any web page is a stark contrast to the Google Base model requiring publishers to submit data in Google's format to a Google uploader. Google drives a lot more traffic than smaller sites such as Technorati, and publishers are willing to take a few extra steps for preferential treatment in the Google index. Technorati could introduce preferential treatment of its microformats in its search result pages, possibly driving a higher proportion of site traffic to microformat publishers.

    I immediately see the potential for Technorati to be overwhelmed with spam and run into some of the same problems as Google Base. Contacts for every camgirl! Mesothelioma consultations during specific hours at Joe's Law Firm. Glowing reviews of the popular pill of the month.

    Overall I see Technorati's microformats search as a necessary step towards more widespread adoption of microformats. The next time publishers wonder who is listening when they add special markup to a page Technorati and other proponents of microformats can drop a link to the Technorati kitchen and gather feedback for the next version of the search results page.

    Update June 1: Kevin Marks announces microformats is a seperate index on the Technorati backend, including non-blog sources such as event listings and contact databases.

    Tags:
  8. Apr03

    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:
  9. Feb14

    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.

    Technorati Alexa numbers over 2 years

    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 graph above shows a steady growth trend since I joined a little over a year ago. According to Hitwise Technorati had about 60% more unique visitors in December than Google Blog Search.

    I had the chance to lead two anti-spam summits and bring together industry heavyweights that had never before met face-to-face. Bloggers are now featured alongside news stories in The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Dateline NBC. It's a lot easier to find content of interest on Technorati thanks to a site overhaul and redesign and new features such as Blog Finder to help pinpoint your personal topics of interest. The blogosphere and search has changed a lot over the past year and taken its place as a viable publishing medium.

    So what's next? I remain excited about blogs, user generated content, feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), search, and other emerging technologies that allow individuals to find and create the things they care about. I am open to new full-time employment and consulting work to apply my passions to new products. Check out my resume in HTML or in Atom podcast format for more information about my work history. Contact me to talk shop, brainstorm, and possibly work together.

    I'll be busy working on new projects to make my favorite Web technologies accessible to more people more often. I have a few consulting gigs lined up, a few ideas that may turn into startups, and I'm also talking to a few companies about how we might work together. Stay tuned for more interesting things in the weeks ahead. I plan to attend ETech next month to talk about some of the more interesting things I've been working on. I'm excited about the future and new possibilities over the next horizon.

  10. Jan30

    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.

    Slashdot feed Google Toolbar view

    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 items are found.

    You can associate your button with a feed containing timely data such as the current temperature, number of new mail messages, or your server's load status. You subscribe to a feed associated with the button and the feed will deliver updated icons and data presented via a tooltip. If you want to view more information you can simply click the button for a full web page.

    There's search too! You can pass into the toolbar button the text entered in the search box, selected text on the page, or the current URL. You may specify locale-specific settings to send users to a different site depending on their language preference or location.

    If you have Google Toolbar 4 installed you can install one of my custom toolbar buttons.

    1. Niall Kennedy's Weblog Google Toolbar button. View my latest entries, search my weblog, or access my weblog homepage with just one click.
    2. Technorati Google Toolbar button. Search Technorati from Google Toolbar. Includes locale-specific targeting to limit results to your Google-configured language or take you to a Technorati Japan results page if you prefer Japanese.

    Each file has an update URL so you can stay up-to-date as I add new features to the button as they are available.

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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