Technorati

» see technorati.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

technorati showed up in my space around 2005. i was a couple of years into the computer engineering degree in ankara and reading the english tech blogs the same way everyone in that cohort was, by chasing whatever scoble or anil dash had linked to that morning. technorati was the engine that connected those links into a graph. it published an authority rank for every blog it indexed and a top hundred list that bloggers refreshed all day to see if they had moved up two spots.

anyway, dave sifry launched it in november 2002 out of san francisco. the technical pitch was that blogs were a distinct corner of the web with their own update pattern, an xml feed every post, and that google web search was the wrong tool for searching them. technorati polled rss feeds, indexed every new post within minutes, and tracked the link graph between blogs. by 2004 it had become the default citation in tech-journalism stories that needed a number for "the blogosphere", which was a real word people used at the time.

2006 was the high-water mark. the company claimed twenty-seven million blogs indexed, the authority rank was treated as a kpi by self-styled a-list bloggers, and sifry's state-of-the-blogosphere report was something the new york times would actually cite. the rank was simple. it counted how many distinct blogs had linked to you in the last six months. you cracked the top hundred and the technorati badge went on your sidebar.

the slow decline started in 2008. social media absorbed the conversation. twitter took the short links and facebook took the longer share. the long-tail blog was no longer the center of where ideas were posted. technorati cut its non-english indexing in 2009, fired most of the original engineering team across 2010 and 2011, and in may 2014 it quietly buried the blog search and the authority rank during a site redesign. the new pitch was advertising. synacor bought the brand for three million dollars in february 2016. that was the end of it as a thing anyone thought about.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the technorati index was a clever idea about feed crawl. every blog of that era pinged technorati.com on each new post, which was a small http request the blogging tool sent in the background. that ping triggered an indexing job inside minutes, which is why technorati search was almost always fresher than google for blog content. for a few years that freshness gap was the whole product.

the authority rank was the social layer. the simplicity of "how many blogs link to you in six months" was readable, the rank shipped as a badge you could paste into your sidebar. the top hundred page was a leaderboard people genuinely competed on. for the 2004 to 2007 blogger, "my technorati rank went up" was a real sentence said in real conversations.

~ the fall ~

this part is more from reading the timeline than from being inside it, but the cracks were visible by 2007. spam blogs (splogs) flooded the index with automated content farms that ran on free wordpress themes and stolen rss feeds. the rank got gameable and the search results got noisy. the technorati team spent more cycles on filtering than on the actual product. sifry stepped down as ceo in august 2007, the register ran a piece that week titled "technorati knocks itself out, again".

the deeper crack was that the blogosphere itself was thinning out, twitter launched in 2006 and by 2009 was eating the short-take share of voice that mid-tier blogs had relied on. facebook took the personal-essay share. the long-tail blog kept existing but the volume of new links between blogs fell every quarter, which means the input signal to the authority rank was drying up from the source.

~ what got buried with it ~

the state-of-the-blogosphere report went away first, the last full edition was 2011. anyway, the public api was deprecated in stages across 2012 and 2013 without much announcement. by may 2014 the actual blog search ui was gone. the press caught up to it weeks later when a writer at the next web noticed the rank was no longer published.

synacor's three-million-dollar acquisition in 2016 was the final number on the brand. for context, sifry had reportedly been offered around fifty million in 2006 by a media company that walked away. the gap between those two numbers is the whole arc of the blog-search category as a business. still, the technorati badge in the sidebar of an archived 2007 blog is its real memorial. the badge image still loads from the same cdn for some of those old templates, with the number on it frozen at whatever the blog's rank was the day the owner stopped updating.

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