Second Round at Blog Searching

As a follow-up to my last entry, it also occurs to me that Technorati isn’t necessarily dead in the water.

This blogspotting entry that I linked to in my last post quotes Wyman (lead man at PubSub) as saying:

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for a startup (read Technorati) to invest in that technology. It’s probably a great learning experience. But you can’t build a sustainable business standing in front of Google.”

But actually, there are two reasons I think it does make a fair amount of sense to be Technorati. The first is that Technorati (and Blogpulse) are both blog-tracking tools as well as searches. Technorati avidly tracks tags and helps categorize blog posts similary to the way the Yahoo! directory categorizes web pages. Blogpulse has excellent “buzz” tools, tracking the most-linked to sites for a day, most yapped about news, etc. These are services that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are unlikely to offer.

Also, developing a solid, reliable algorithm *first* is never a bad idea. Remember when Yahoo! search ran off the Google search code? Yahoo! has a long history of finding good ideas, and either buying up the company or licensing the services for their use. There’s no reason to suspect that “Yahoo! Powered by Technorati” is a phrase we’ll never see.