Technorati Japan

I’ve always been less than impressed by Technorati so far. Most of the time I’ve found it to be slow (“Searching the World Live Web”… what?) and giving tangled, far from optimal results.

At least in my blog’s case, 90% of results are myself linking to myself, and half of the rest are links from side-bars or blogrolls, while only real entry-to-entry links should be shown in order to make it a usable tool. Their engine needs to be able to recognize where a blog entry starts and ends, but currently it just indexes all links in the whole page. Things haven’t seemed to improve since the beginning.

I was also disappointed by their recent tagging initiative, which is a step away from standards. Indeed, blogs are required to link directly to them in order for the tags to work! Why not simply suggest a smart use of the rel attribute or anything else that doesn’t imply them being the blog tagging central?

Sadly, I see Technorati as a bunch of great ideas done wrong.