Dazed Confused and Technorati

Om Malik, Wednesday, May 23, 2007 at 7:57 AM PT Comments (11)

Dazed and confused is how I felt when I took a look at Technorati this morning. According to all the hub-a-bub, the company has changed focus away from blog search to … something that I can’t figure out. Maybe my neurons are misfiring this morning, but I don’t get it. (Someone apparently does, so check out this alternative viewpoint.)

Dave Sifry, the founder explains that the world has changed and people are now coming to their site to get contextual information from the Live Web (buzzword alert.) Unfortunately, that is the direction Google, the nemesis of blog search is moving in this direction, notes Steve Rubel.

The Hit had been out on the blog-search for a long time, though it is becoming obvious with each passing day. There has been some talk about Technorati looking for a new chief executive and that the company is “in play.”

Disclosure: Technorati competitor, Sphere is a portfolio company of True Ventures, our backers.

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11 comments so far

May 23rd, 2007
9:46 AM PT

Om, you’re head is fine. Technorati is going down the toilet. They at least did one thing marginally well and now they do everything poorly. This is going to be a disaster. At least Yahoo might have bought them earlier. Google BlogSearch is going to dominate them.

May 23rd, 2007
9:56 AM PT
Om Malik said:

Thanks Jay - now i will stop searching for that elusive box of advil and get back to work. Yeah - i think this is the fate of many start-ups that are features-posing-as-companies.

May 23rd, 2007
10:52 AM PT
David said:

I was a bit confused when I jumped on their today as well. It looks as if they are jumping on the “universal search” wagon.

BTW - did you notice the digg-clone voting feature they added to the blog search?

…”WTF?”

May 23rd, 2007
11:36 AM PT
Kamla Bhatt said:

Thanks goodness I was not the only one feeling “dazed and confused” and thought my “neurons are misfiring.”

What is with Technorati’s new look?

Kamla

May 23rd, 2007
11:46 AM PT

Forgive the grammatical error earlier.

May 23rd, 2007
11:48 AM PT
Terry Ng said:

Why they’re moving away from a “blog-centric” focus is beyond me. :(

May 23rd, 2007
1:07 PM PT
Tony said:

After playing around with, I have to admit that I quite like the new feel… with the exception of the homepage ticker :-P

May 23rd, 2007
4:27 PM PT
EAS said:

I can understand the shift in focus, but the execution is terrible. It seems like they should have eased into it more slowly to give their existing users a chance to adjust, and to give themselves time to polish the new features.

May 23rd, 2007
11:53 PM PT
gagan said:

well we have mashup for combining blog video.. etc. searches technorati was leading their way in Blog search they were quite gud with all those cool features why d hell they are tryin to destroy themselves

May 24th, 2007
10:51 AM PT
pwb said:

Technorati is beyond lame. How hard is it to provide basic blog search?

May 28th, 2007
10:38 AM PT
Jimmy Crickets said:

This marks the beginning of the end for Technorati. The last dinosaur of the dot com bubble.

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