Technorati Annoyances

Technorati.corn is a blog search engine. (They also search flickr images, but that’s a minor part of their operations) They are considered to be so important that, on more than one occassion, I have seen CNN’s Internet reporters referring to technorati’s top search items as expressive of what Americans (and others) are interested in. The top search items, appearing under the search bar in the home page, are updated every hour to reflect what most people are searching for. About 1-2 weeks ago, I finally joined technorati. I had always been pinging technorati, but you have to claim your blog for the results to show up publicly - at least that’s what it seemed like in my experience because when I searched for stuff I had blogged about before joining, it was not displayed.

I think it’s a really great search engine and I have discovered other blogs through my searches and have been discovered by other bloggers who have linked to me. And what a difference one link makes! A second person linked to me and my ranking went from somewhere around 750,000 (1 being most linked to) to somewhere around 550,000. So I guess there are a lot of blogs out there with just one link less than me.

But on to what is annoying me about technorati. Technorati’s jingled is that they don’t search the World Wide Web, they search the “World Live Web”. The implication being that they have much more relavent results than Google with respect to the temporal dimension. In other words, you may find better data on Google, but it may be a few years old. In today’s fast-paced world you want recent data - especially when blogs are concerned. Therefore, when you search for a term on technorati, it lists the relavent blogs in order from most recent to oldest.

So far so good! Here’s the annoying part - when I search for a given term, sometimes I see a blog that technorati lists as “posted 5 minutes ago”. But when *I* post about something, it doesn’t appear on technorati for hours! That’s not useful to me! By that time my link might be on page 2 or 3 where it is exponentially less likely to be read by someone! I want to know why this is! Why can’t MY posts appear five minutes after a post? Is it something wrong with the way my server accepts bots? Is it because I haven’t been a member long enough and so I haven’t earned the right to be posted right away? Do I not have enough links?

I’d love to know why, but it isn’t listed anywhere on the technorati site - and I’ve spent hours looking for it. If anyone knows that answer - please leave a comment on this post so that I could finally be at peace.