submit to reddit

Technorati has launched a very buggy beta of its Blog Finder service. It’s supposed to rank blogs by category or technically speaking, by tags. But it doesn’t work.
First of all, Technorati tags don’t work. Like many other bloggers, I find Technorati, which is supposed to integrate with Moveable Type, doesn’t pick up my tags. I have to enter them manually.
Then there’s the problem of lack of uniformity in tags. Look at Hurricane Katrina for example. You’ll find “Hurricane+Katrina,” “Hurricane_Katrina,” “Katrina,” “Hurricane+Relief,” and many other tags on blogs writing about the disaster.
Technorati Blog Search System is Ill-Conceived
What’s Next Blog doesn’t appear to be in the database at all. Technorati shows 161 posts on a “What’s Next Blog” search, although it includes all mentions of “what’s,” “next,” and “what’s next” as well as a few results from this blog.
Technorati needs to let bloggers define the way their site should be included. Most people who write about this blog refer to it by my name, so a search on “B.L. Ochman” nets 268 links today and one on “ochman” is the most accurate, with 1,601. Yet business, marketing, PR and general blogs with as few as 34 links are listed and this one isn’t.
Technorati can’t handle the searches it has; it freezes when a topic gets hot and even on an average day and returns “servers overloaded” messages. The last thing they need to do right now is launch a buggy, ill-conceived new search.
UPDATE: How strange. Last night What’s Next Blog didn’t show up under any category and now, according to my colleague, Josh Hallet, writing in Business Blog Consulting, we’re number one in Public Relations, even thought that’s not what this blog is about.
David Sifry, Technorati founder, says:
BL,
We knew that we weren’t going to get it right on the first pass – which is why we developed the system so that you can tag your own blog, and specify the tags that youw ant to be listed under. Here’s more details on how you can do it:
Dave
, ,