With the major competition from the huge companies getting under way, Sifry decided that it was the technology plus a competitive secret that he knew that would be the way to battle the behemoths.
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He knew that simply branded themselves to the world as the original blog search company was out of the question. Google and the others would be able to easily outspend them. He also ruled out going and looking for a buyer as he really believed and understood the underlying technology and purpose behind it.
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He believed correctly that Google was going to approach the blog search area in the same way they did the Web. The way Google looks at its famous PageRank algorithm indexes keywords and also at the amount of people linking to the websites to determine the best match for the search, was also their weakness.
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Googles way of looking at the web is to view it as a huge library, perusing through the billions of pages and showing the ones that seem most relevant no matter what age they are.
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Sifry looks at the blogosphere from a totally different point of view. He says that its more of a conversation then it is a library. That’s why he said that it is Technorati’s priority to make sure that the search show items that are listed in the last 10 – 20 minutes.
Sifry was right in reference to the blogosphere and Technorati was running from the beginning to keep of with the blogging explosion.
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Because of the growth, Technorati was subject to challenge on a variety of issues as it had to deal with blog spammers, searches were beginning to take longer and were getting a lot more error messages. Their customer support was so flooded that it would take over a week to answer some of the issues presented.
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aSifry has responded with more speed in the search results and anding new features to add value to the product.
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He feels that the biggest advantage that Technorati has though is its niche. All the other coming competitors are fighting battles on all different fronts. They just have to focus on the blogoshere.
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A lot of the credit for their growth in offers and deals he says goes to Google. "I no longer have to explain what a blog is, it's absolutely an easier business discussion now."
Gary,
We are big users of Technorati and we are glad that they are there.
It does appear that they are being overwhelmed with growth. We have submitted a number of technical support issues and have yet to receive any response.
Here are some of our problems:
- We are unable to claim several of our blogs.
- Stats that show the ping recency are not always accurate
- Some of our blogs are not showing the accurate number of links
We are eager to have a close association with Technorati. We can be patient with their growth challenges, but the longer it takes to resolve their issues, the more distrust the community will have with their services and the bigger the window is for a competitive threat from Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
Posted by: Tim Stay | February 23, 2006 10:16 PM | Permalink to Comment