Jun

13

Why put more money into Technorati?

June 13, 2008 |

imageTechnorati, the has-been blog search engine founded in 2002, just got another round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation. With the $7.5 million they got this time, they have now received a total of $29.1 million.

The real question I have about this is: why? As Duncan Riley points out (though he is less down on Technorati overall than I am), Technorati is a broken system. As a blog search engine, it’s not exactly trustworthy and has long been eclipsed by Google’s Blog Search.

At the beginning of the your, Technorati announced that it was going to shift its focus away from search towards becoming a blog advertising company – however, like that has happened so far.

Overall, today’s Technorati is the same unfocused mess that it was when its old CEO David Sifry left last August. None of the new products stuck – and most of them were either clones of already existing services or completely bland ideas anyway.

Even bloggers barely pay attention to Technorati anymore – and that is no suprise, given that it seems as if Technorati only indexes posts on its own schedule. It can take days before links appear in Technorati, while Google often indexes within minutes; and Technorati’s index is still overflowing with spam – a problem Technorati never got under control.

Overall, the service  feels like a shadow of the promise it once held. I don’t know what drove the investors to put more money into it. Even if the mythical advertising network appears at some point, it will face so much competition that it’s unlikely to be highly successful, as Technorati’s name doesn’t exactly have a ring of trustworthiness to it anymore and hence isn’t going to attract most bloggers.


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