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Bloggers’ buzz: Technorati to be sold?
The “blogosphere” is “buzzing” with “catchphrases” about a rumor that surfaced on B.L. Ochman’s site (via Micro Persuasion): Technorati, a leading blogs-only search engine, is about to be sold to a “large search engine company.”
This could change the landscape of the search engine world fairly significantly. icerocket.com has the support of Mark Cuban’s deep pockets (even though we don’t know how much support, in terms of money) and is charging hard, but Technorati still appears to have a larger user base. If Technorati suddenly were under the wings of a large search engine company, they might gain an even stronger hold on the real-time search market.
Of course, I think this will force other blog search engines to keep striving to improve their product to keep up — so for the user, I believe this can only mean good things.
Now, the rumors don’t say which major search engine is buying Technorati, which means that we all have an excellent opportunity for blind speculation — one of my favorite activities! Yahoo! would almost certainly be out, I would think, having just purchased blo.gs. That leaves Google, Microsoft, and some of the smaller players like Excite or maybe even IceRocket.
Out of that group, I’d say Google is the most likely to do it. They have the cash (have you seen their stock price lately?) and they need that part of the market filled in. Microsoft does, too, but I see them as more likely to create their own service than buy an existing service. Thus, I’m betting a quarter that if this rumor is true and Technorati does get sold, that it’s Google that does the buying.
Fri August 12th, 2005 2:25 pm
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I went to Technorati to test it out. It’s interesting, but I’m not quite convinced of the utility of a search engine that only searches blogs. Of course, somewhere down the line, people will perhaps laugh at this comment. It will probably be akin to saying, “I’m not sure of the utility of recording television programs.” Or maybe not.
On the plus side, I actually managed to pull up my own blog with a search. On the minus side, it’s really, really slow. I did three searches and each time had to go away from the site for a couple of minutes to let it do its thing in the background. Maybe it’s getting unusual traffic right now on account of the rumors, though.
My quarter’s with yours on Google.
I already laugh at your comment, Rob.
I think a search engine for blogs sounds like a really handy thing. I wonder, though: would it only search those which are classified as public, however the coding on that must work? Would it only be personally coded/constructed/whatever blogs, or would blog sites be searched? You may have answered all this in the entry, but the tech-speak makes it hard for me.
Gosh, I really hate feeling less-than-informed; I know I could understand this stuff if I had sufficient time and instruction.
My sincere hope is that Google ponies up the dough — they have a great track record of improving the usability of existing ideas without fatiguing the user base with misguided profit motives. Not to mention the fact that Technorati could really use a steady hand to sort out some of the possibilities inherent in the API that have as yet been poorly exploited.