Technorati Still Ahead of Google Blogsearch

Posted on March 1, 2006

Inc.com has an article that tells the origin of David Sifry's Technorati and his decision to stick with his business plan in the battle against Google.

A former Wall Street analyst, Sifry developed the technology in early 2002, while working as chief technology officer at Sputnik, a wireless computer networking start-up he had co-founded. On the side, he kept a blog, mostly to expound on tech issues, and he was curious to know who was reading it. So he spent an evening writing software code that would help answer the question. At the time, most bloggers were techies like Sifry or teenagers posting their diaries. But the phenomenon took off, and Sifry's website, which he had dubbed Technorati, was seeing rapid traffic growth and even some paying customers--including The New York Times and Reuters, both of which licensed the technology to track what bloggers were saying about their articles.

Google debuted Google Blogsearch on September 14, 2005. Google Blogsearch is very fast but it doesn't do many of the valuable things Technorati does that appeal to bloggers like blogger profiles, tags, top news stories, etc.

The prototype of Google's Blog Search went live at midnight on September 14, 2005. Most of Technorati's work force of about 30 was online, waiting. Sifry spent about half an hour checking it out, then posted a welcome note to his new competitor on his blog, including some friendly trash-talking about all the things Technorati could do that Google couldn't, such as image finding. Then Sifry went home and got some sleep.
There were no big surprises. Google Blog Search, he concluded, was solid but simple. It seemed to have a hard time keeping up with the dynamism of the blogging world; many search results it displayed were more than 24 hours old, which is ages in the blogosphere. On the other hand, Google delivered those results in less than half a second, compared with at least a full second for Technorati. It sounds minor, but in the world of Web search, that's a big difference. "We knew we had a lot of work to do," Sifry says.

Google Blogsearch is still in beta test today nearly six full months after its launch. The Inc.com article cites a company called Hitwise which says Technorati is still growing faster than Google Blogsearch. Most bloggers probably use Technorati, Google Blogsearch and other blog search engines like IceRocket.com and BlogPulse to keep track of inbound links. This is because they tend to all have slightly different results.