Scobleizer - Latest Comments in If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

LiQ — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:35:41 -0000

Hi Robert

Nice work as always.

My question is what scenario a blog-niched search engine is good for.

If I want to know how to override the Paint-event on a .NET-button, there is probably a bigger chance to find that all over the Internet (Google). If want to know the address to Robert Scoble's blog I still use Google. If I want to know what Scoble wrote today I navigate to your site or check my feeds.

What the deal is? Is it for people who want to know what the Blogosphere's last take on sliced bread is?

Thanks

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Salubri — Thu, 24 May 2007 05:00:00 -0000

Otis @39 and Simon @20
There was a problem with multiple pages of search results if using space separated search strings.
Technorati have now fixed this.
http://support.technorati.c...

I have to say - I'm pretty pleased with the response when putting something on the support forum - for a few guys they cover a lot of ground!

When a friend of mine "lost" her gmail account last month on the other hand... Let's just say support was not forthcoming... I have had no problems with gmail or any google service (testimonial in itself) but I dread the day I do!

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

shaz — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:04:51 -0000

i think microsoft is just too busy doing other stuff to worry about their search engine. and yahoo well i just dont know about them. technorati has been from with the blogging era so it has to stay to the same pace i suppose.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 18:15:40 -0000

Simon Brocklehurst:
Spam is a problem for everyone. Spam is detected and killed all kinds of different ways 24/7. You'd be happy to hear that another spam handling fix on the way but, of course, the battle continues. :)

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Simon Brocklehurst — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:55:28 -0000

Otis, Kudos to the Technorati team for getting a fix to the bug I described @ #20 implemented so quickly (it's not pushed out as I write this, but I'm sure it will be done later today as you said @ #42).

The truth is - things go wrong sometimes; what counts is how people put things right when they do. So, well done.

On my other point about Spam results - you do seem to have a problem indexing a bunch of porn-related blogs (all created by the same person/organisation and all on blogspot); these are not real blogs - they seem to simply forward to lookuplive.com

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Eugueny — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:44:09 -0000

What are you talking about? What is "live"? What I see is a silly and slowish homepage with 3(!) search results given to me by default.

In a world of search the main thing that matters is relevance. Technorati sucks at this, they are not much better than old and dumb search engines of old: altavista, lycos, etc. Who, in their right mind, would ever bother using technorati to *find* something?

Besides, when people search for information, they truly do not care what data format that information is from (HTML/PDF/DOC/RSS). Therefore THERE AREN'T any "search niches" for companies like technorati to occupy. Well, except, maybe, for video: when people search video, they usually *want video*.

This leaves me with a question: why are they still alive? The answer IMO is simple: RSS hype. Actually, their business is built on a big lie: they used to call themselves "blog search engine", while in reality they concentrated on searching RSS feeds. And who, tell me, would ever want to search only RSS? And why?

As far as "blog searching niche" goes, guess what a blog really is? Just another HTML page, like any other. And google is still pretty good at that.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:37:15 -0000

Steve:
Good point about relevance + (recent) time slice.

Srikanth:
That's what bookmarks are for. Can you remember the simple name Simpy? Try http://www.simpy.com/ for bookmarking.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Srikanth — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:52:31 -0000

The name "Technorati" is hard to remember.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Steve — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:39:01 -0000

Otis -

You're right, switching to date order does bring GBS search relevance down, leveling the playing field. But it's nice to have the option to switch between the two, though. Especially since date-ordered searches are filled with junk.

So I must be missing the point - probably I'm just not a "live" searcher. In GBS why wouldn't I want to sort by relevance, but get results from the last day, or hour? I understand the relevance of sub-hour indexing for ego searches or perhaps breaking news, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't affect me - someone who just wants to find information relevant to a query.

Anyway, don't mean to go on and on about this. I was just curious what the hype was about. I didn't see enough improvement in search to validate Scoble's high praise. But Technorati is still a great service for what it does, and slow and steady improvement is just fine.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Joost Schuur — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:13:01 -0000

I just tried a search for 'technorati scoble' and expected to get some of this morning's posts back either under the featured tab, or at the very least int he blogs section. No dice on either at 11:10 AM Pacific.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:12:38 -0000

Simon Brocklehurst:
Good news - the page #2 problem and query encoding has already been fixed, and the fix will be pushed out later today.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:05:52 -0000

Simon Brocklehurst:
The number of hits on page #2 in your example does look off. Probably a bug. Will be fixed.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:03:35 -0000

Robert Dewey:
Have you looked at http://s.technorati.com/ ?
That's pretty uncluttered and fast, no?

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:02:29 -0000

Salubri:
No problems with getting to the second page of results.
Here is an example: http://s.technorati.com/luc...
or
http://www.technorati.com/p...

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

rexsorgatz — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:01:58 -0000

FWIW, Pageflakes and Microsoft are cozy with each other. Pageflakes uses the Microsoft Javascript library, Atlas.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Otis Gospodnetic — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:59:04 -0000

Steve:
Whenever Google BS and Technorati's blog search are compared, the sorting order used on GBS is important. The details is *relevance*. Technorati is about *live* web. This results in different results. To compare GBS and Technorati's blog search, one needs to use "by date" sorting in GBS.

Here is a little indexing speed test from yesterday:
http://jroller.com/page/oti...

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Steve — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:42:53 -0000

To Matthew Levine - first, I appreciate you coming and answering questions about the search. And thanks, turning up authority did get rid of a lot of the spam.

But in the end, it didn't really seem to matter. Try searching for "french elections" in both search engines. Or one of my original searches, "Half Life 2". Multi-word searches don't really seem to work very well. Among other things, I think Google's got term proximity valuation cranked way higher, and it helps. All the articles in Google are relevant while close to none are relevant in Technorati search.

Plus, ".net" doesn't even register as a term, so I can't do my typical code-by-example searches.

Each search I've mentioned is just a random topic, not something I'd necessarily really search on, so maybe I can't judge it until I /need/ to use it. Still, the lessons that Google has learned over the years of query interpretation are very evident in their results. I truly wish you luck since another good search source is always welcome!

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

engtech — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:39:25 -0000

Technorati Favorites and Favorites RSS feed still doesn't list all the updates from blogs you've favorited.

It picks a handful of your favorites and those are the only ones it shows:

http://technorati.com/faves...
http://engtech-favs.tumblr....

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Christopher Coulter — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:31:01 -0000

Beat Google? On what planet? Searching for "Andrew Keen" on Techorati gets me total junk in a raw search.

With keyword searching I have always found Techorati to be spam-filled irrelevant, hardly worthy of the name 'search engine'...never get good results. And now it looks all horridly Web 2.0 UIified on the main page.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

McD — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:28:18 -0000

Robert,

"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a quote from Bill Joy that he made after observing that there are always more smart people outside a company than inside it. It's an idea the resonates with Dave Winer's unConference idea that the smartest people are often in the audience.

Technorati is a collection of smart people that determined an opening in search and then focused on that area (blog search). Of course, a focused effort by any well funded company can create a response but hopefully, "time to market" and brand still have market effects. Wouldn't it be great to see the Technorati team profit from their efforts and NOT just see Google fix their blog search service and watch Technorati do that slow slide into irrelevance?
Innovation deserves some rewards and not just to be copied and made superflous.

I'm glad to see you trumpeting the little guy and not just asking the users of such services to be patient and expect MS or Google to fix their difficiencies.

"Innovation happens elsewhere" is the corrollary to:

"You can't hire all the really smart people" and the basic essential ingredient of successful start-ups:

"They are fueled by the intense passion of people who are risking everything to make their company successful." As a by-product they get the risk taker that gambles on their own talent to our perform the well funded, PhD driven mega-corporations. Yahoo, Google, Apple, Sun and MS had start-up phases where they exemplified these attributes. They are the model that drives the inmnovator to believe the effort is worth the price in perosnal terms... long hours, damaged relationships or no relationships outside of work.

(PS - for a start-up, being acquiured is a way to cash in but typically the end of the passion... see Blogger, Flickr, Reddit, Weblogs Inc., and others as examples. The risk takers pocket the rewards and (typically) sneak out to do it (maybe) one more time.
Like Evan, Winer, and many others.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Salubri — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:19:14 -0000

Is anyone else having trouble getting to the second page of results on the stripped down version? Do a search for something with a couple of thousand results (not filtered by authority) like "hurricane Ireland" and click on "next" for the next page of results... I have tried in Firefox and IE so far with no joy. Page 1 says there are 2269 results but page 2 says there are 3 results and lists NONE.

The search on the main site works fine...

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Robert Dewey — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:51:58 -0000

The search is pretty good, IMO... I guess if you're looking for generic things such as "cool video" or "red car", you're going to get bad results. It seems many of you are doing this, and then claiming the results suck.

However, the UI is pretty cluttered and unappealing.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

rod — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:38:06 -0000

Its certainly an improvement, but I still find the Technorati algorithm to be confusing at best - i.e.: if I search for "techfold" (my blogs name), I get a mix of my own posts and others that have mentioned me: shouldn't there be a conceptual split between pages FROM techfold, and pages that MENTION techfold? Of course, I could say the same thing about Google, thought goog's clustering is better.

My other thought: funny that you suggest "small is good" - given that one of the primary critiques of 2.0 is that many startups are just "features" not businesses. IMHO you're right: features can be a successful strategy, as Technorati & Pageflakes are demonstrating.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Phill — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:25:23 -0000

I forgot, have a pat on the back for telling Google when it's being useless. I made the same point a few days ago and people practically spat in me in their haste to tell me that Google was untouchable and can never, ever, be criticised.

Re: If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?

Phill — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:13:25 -0000

if i put in my name (phill midwinter) i get everyone elses blog where they've nicked my articles, and not my own. brilliance.