Technorati's Rankings Don't Mean Beans

Nope, it's not just Stowe Boyd wondering what's up with Technorati's search rankings.

If I type in BL Ochman, (no periods) Technorati lists 1,260 posts linking to me.

For B.L. Ochman, (with periods) they list 322 posts

For www.whatsnextblog.com Technorati says that 564 links. That's impossible, of course, since What's Next Blog is where all the references to my name, with whatever spelling, originate.

All of which means that Technorati rankings don't really mean beans.

I agree that Technorati results are very suspicious overall -- especially when compared with searches on similar tools such as Feedster and Bloglines. That said, I think the explanation for the discrepancy you have noted is that Technorati is actually searching the post text and is not "smart" enough to associate that "BL Ochman" is the same as "B.L. Ochman." In other words, it's all due to the variations in how exactly other bloggers mention your name - and whether or not they actually include a URL.

For what it's worth, I prefer to use the (somewhat hidden) Bloglines citation function. Type your url here: http://www.bloglines.com/citations and you come up with 1523 other blog posts that link to your site.

Agreed here as well. The problem is, the brand is so ingrained in many people who track the Web these days that it continues to "lead" the pack, at least as far as discussions go.

Nick...right on with the assesment of the BL "name game" on Technorati. Technorati seems to be one of the only search engines that differentiates punctuation in keyword searches (e.g., do a search on 'web 2.0' versus 'web 20'). It is debatable whether that is a good or a bad thing. In BL's case it obviously is not good but in my example of 'web 2.0' it actually is. Without that distinction, all posts that contained 'web' AND '20' would show up when querying for 'web 2.0' (although via the 'web 2.0' query all posts containing 'web' and '2.0' are returned, the results are signigicantly better).

In regards to Bloglines citations, that number is not quite acurate either. Blogline citations often does double counting. For example, when using Feedburner feeds, Bloglines counts both the link in a post and the link in the Feedburner feed. No good.

BL...in that final example, you give (http://technorati.com/search/www.whatsnextblog.com), you are actually asking Technorati to search all blogs that link to the domain "www.whatsnextblog.com". It actually has nothing to do with the number of times your name appears.

All in all, I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiments. We need a better way for "stat tracking" to be done and I am sure that those like Technorati and Bloglines are aware of that. Now, it is a matter of if they want to address this problem.

Hi BL,
You have confused a keyword search and a URL search as being one and the same. A mention of your name and a link to your blog are two separate things.

A keyword search on Technorati will return references to your search term in any blog across Technorati's database of blogs. The blogs listed in the results may or may not have used your search term to link to your site. A keyword search returns the total number of matches for your search term. Technorati ranks blogs, not keywords.

Technorati does not currently try to correct a user's query on his or her behalf. Some search engines alter a user's query so that a search for "puppy" becomes a search for "puppy" or "puppies" and other derivatives of the search term.

You can search for multiple terms by adding OR to your query. I use this technique for my own ego search since my name is so commonly misspelled. A search for "BL Ochman" OR "B.L. Ochman" will return a combined search.

Keyword search:
http://technorati.com/search/%22BL+Ochman%22+OR+%22B.L.+Ochman%22

URL search:
http://technorati.com/search/whatsnextblog.com

Niall Kennedy
Community Manager
Technorati

Niall: Thanks so much for your response. I didn't confuse the searches. The the point I'm making is that Technorati's ranking are not very meaningful, or up to date.

I will use the combined search from here on. However, this shouldn't require a special explanation from you. Technorati ought to explain it on the search segment of the site.

And this still doesn't explain why the Technorati search results are so frequently so far out of date or why they miss so much I see from my trackbacks and from an ego search on Google or Yahoo.