The Last Podcast

According to Zoli (with hat tip to Techcrunch), blog search engine Technorati is silently scaling back its index and only returning results from the last six months:

The only time-limit I’m aware of is calculating Authority, which is based on the revolving 6-month link-counts,  but I haven’t found any reference in Technorati’s FAQ to the “shelf-life” of posts in their main index.  I’ve only done limited testing, but if indeed this is the case, then Technorati is toast.  There’s a lot of value in old posts, and the index that finds them is not Technorati, but Google.

TechCrunch got confirmation of this from Technorati (and Ian Kallen said the same in Zoli’s comments:

We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.

TechCrunch rightly emphasizes the “Most people don’t notice.” And the reason for that is dead simple: Technorati is far past its prime. So far actually, it gets pretty smelly once you head over there. While brining back statistics was a good move, and adding a useless, non-real time scrolling list of articles a stupid waste of development resources, users have moved on and are now enjoying the speed and reliability of Goolge’s blogsearch (which is now integrated with your Web History).

Technorati was once mighty and powerful, but then they couldn’t really scale, indexing dropped out for weeks at times and people moved on. They rendered themselves useless.

Scaling back search results now is a sign of weakness. The only question to me is if Technorati will see the end of 2008 as a company? My guess is it won’t, especially if you are already in a situation where your few users left don’t notice your mistakes anymore.