Technorati - Now Completely Useless

While I am by no means the first to voice my concerns over Technorati’s recent demise, I think it is yet again time for someone to point out how they have completely wasted the once so promising position they found themselves in.

Although their services have been everything but fully functional for the past few months, I have continued to go back, hoping that they would soon be restored to their former glory. But now I am officially giving them up, and declaring them dead to me at least. What was once a useful tool for bloggers in order to track the growth and popularity of their blogs, has now been reduced to waste.

Disagree? I present you with a small list of evidence. Granted these are things that could easily be rectified by the Technorati team, but the lack of interest they have shown in the past couple of months for actually doing so, leads me to believe that they have even given up themselves.

Blog posts are not being indexed properly. While indexing many millions of blogs and what they write about is no small task, a service that gets its bread and butter from doing it, should be able to pride themselves by doing it in a reliable fashion.

As an extension to this, their whole service is completely unreliable, in particular the search function and the favorites function. The latest posts from my favorites frequently disappear, only to reappear but then not up to date at all.

Result? WordPress have dropped Technorati when displaying the most recent reactions to your posts, and now uses Google’s Blogsearch (the large keep growing).

Authority is not being updated at all across the board. Just have a look at this thread in the Technorati Support Forums, which was started a month ago, currently has 32 replies and still no response from the staff.

Although it has been criticized for being to easy to game, this of course makes the Authority function completely useless, as it no longer reflects any accuracy of a blog’s popularity at all.

With Authority not being updated, and reactions to your own blog posts not being indexed properly, it is as the headline states, completely useless as a tool for bloggers and keeping track of what happens around their own blog.

The search function is worthless because posts are not being indexed properly.

Technorati is now crap, and I will never use it again.

Well that last statement is a tad angry-fanboy-ish, especially seeing how I am avid supporter of Technorati and the services they provide for bloggers. It was an excellent tool for keeping track of the blogosphere, and in particularly staying up to date on the community around your own blog.

I also loved the fact that a simple start-up like Technorati is, was able to get a firm stronghold over this position, compared to the alternative, which is as we are seeing right now, that a giant corporation like Google is taking over another important part of the web. Unfortunately, because of all the problems at Technorati and no end of them in sight, I am now forced to turn to Google with my blog searches as well.

And just to top it off, I give you a screenshot of what the reactions page to this very blog looks like as of now:

Screenshot missing

Now that is a lot of reaction from many unidentified blogs with no authority at all. Excellent, if the staff over at Technorati keep this up, it will not be long before we have to go the the Internet Archive to be reminded what Technorati used to be!