What Went Wrong With Technorati?

I have always been a big fan of Technorati. As I built and grew my first blog, I paid a close attention to blog rankings and invested much of my time to rank high on them. Technorati and Alexa were among my favorite ranking systems. I’ve truly invested time and resources to rank high in these rankings as they were widely used by advertisers to gauge the value of a blog.

Not until lately, Technorati’s value to advertisers and bloggers have diminished tremendously. The usual buddies I have online who always talk about their Technorati ranking progress seem to have stopped blogging about it. It’s not only my friends, but when you go around the Blogosphere, you’ll feel that the once popularly talked about… Technorati has become insignificant.

Is Technorati dead? Are Technorati ranking and Technorati authority still hold some value for bloggers and advertisers? Is Technorati search engine still used?

Apparently, Technorati is not yet dead. It’s still operational and some changes have been implemented on their homepage where they tried to include more useful features. Just lately, Technorati received additional funding amounting to US$7.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation.

While Technorati is doing its best to thrive and grow, it hasn’t done enough to make sure it performs its main functions. If you noticed, Technorati has not been indexing blog reactions as frequent as before. Technorati blog ranking and authority are now infrequently updated. Sometimes the updates are one week due. As a result, the main users (bloggers and advertisers) of Technorati shifted on using other ranking system.

Another Technorati function, its search engine, has become notoriously unreliable. The search results are oftentimes loaded with spam and are usually less relevant to the users. One of the reasons why Technorati was popular before was because its search engine is popularly used by bloggers and advertisers. Because the search results are full of garbages, naturally, users have to find better blog search engines. In terms of search result’s relevance and accuracy, Google Blog Search is so much better than Technorati.

Technorati failed because the people behind it weren’t able to identify the best feature of Technorati worth investing on. Instead, they spend much of their financial resources on “new” features that have already been introduced in other websites. If Technorati wants to survive, it must do what it can while it is still possible. I just can’t believe that a company that big can’t even think of more innovative features to include in their services. Technorati should go back to its main functions and improve its efficiency on them.

What do you think should Technorati do to save itself from total failure? What do you think went wrong with Technorati? Do share your thoughts through the comment.

Thank you for your time.