Sifry's Alerts

Happy 3 year Birthday, Technorati!

Wow, it has been 3 years since the public release of Technorati, which I described in this blog post on November 27,2002. I'm frankly surprised to be doing what I'm doing with such a great team. Niall has put together an unofficial timeline of Technorati's life.

As a cursory read over what the original Technorati site did, you can see that our track record is about 50/50 - of the 4 features that I thought would be most interesting to people, two of them (Link Cosmos and Watchlists) made it, and are an integral part of our services today, and two of the features (Google Rank and Google Juice) got dropped. One of the interesting things that I've found during the three years since is that the success percentage has stayed about the same - about 50% of what we do (like tags, Blog Finder, Keyword Search, etc) have turned out successfully, a whole bunch of things we did were dead ends, missed opportunities, and outright failures.

And I gotta say, I'm awfully grateful to have had such a high success ratio. And I'm incredibly grateful to have the best users, customers, and partners in the world. Many thanks to our advisors and many friends of Technorati. You folks are great. Thanks for sticking by us during our tough times as well as during our successes.

We're redoubling our commitment to our corporate mantra: Be Of Service. That's what drives me and the whole team, to focus on being of service to you, our users, to our members, customers, partners, and to each other. I and the whole team look forward to your feedback.

Now, back to work for me!

Technorati Tags: gratitude, technorati, thanks, wow

Technorati Performance Improvement Update

I'm incredibly proud of the Technorati Engineering and Ops teams. They have been working day and night to deal with all of the growth that Technorati has been going through. Back in July, we made it our highest priority to improve site performance, and I and our team members kept you updated in some earlier posts.

Here's some facts:

• Since beginning our infrastructure improvements, Technorati's uptime has improved significantly - in fact, we had 100% uptime for searches last month!
• According to GrabPerf, even while our overall traffic has increased, our response times have consistently decreased: We are currently averaging subsecond response times for all core products: Search (766 ms), single-word search (651 ms), and Tags (836 ms).
• A quick comparison of search speed of various blog engines is below, and you can see the continuous improvements that our engineers have been making over the past weeks and months. Technorati is the light blue line that is sandwiched right in there with Google Blog Search (731 ms) and Yahoo Blog Search (835 ms).

• Here's another insight: Open the following three links in separate tabs in your browser, and click back and forth between them to get a quick view of the frequency distribution of search results: Technorati, Google, and Yahoo. The further the results are to the left hand side of the graph (consistently fast results), the better it is.
• Technorati's index is the most comprehensive, and has the fastest updates. The index is over 3 years old, currently tracks over 21.5 million blogs, over 280 million unique posts and over 1.7 billion links are indexed. We are tracking over 60,000 new blogs each day, and over 700,000 new posts per day. Our median time to index is now under 3 minutes from the moment a blog post is created.

Notes: All engines noted are for the companies' blog search services. All of those graphs are updated dynamically, so don't be surprised if the numbers loook a little different when you click on them.

All this, and we rolled out a number of new features and improvements to current services as well. I'm just very, very proud of our team, and I'm really grateful to be able to work with them each day. And we're constantly striving to do better. Please send us feedback and let us know how we can make things even better for you - what are we missing? How can we be more of service to you?

Update: Many thanks to Randy Charles Morin for pointing out a typo in the stats on number of blogs indexed, I have updated the post to include the correct number of blogs and posts. I also added in the number of new blogs and posts we're tracking every day as well. Thanks, Randy!

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, blogsearch, competition, feedback, givingthanks, google, gratitude, scaling, search, search engine, statistics, stats, technorati, wow, yahoo