Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. The name Technorati is a blend, pointing to the technological version of literati or intellectuals.

Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry and its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, USA. Tantek Çelik was the site's Chief Technologist.

Technorati uses and contributes to open source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Sifry is a major open-source advocate, and was a founder of LinuxCare and later of Wi-Fi access point software developer Sputnik. Technorati includes a public developer's wiki, where developers and contributors collaborate, as well as various open APIs.

The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show. It was also nominated for a 2006 Webby award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps.

Technology

Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites. These tags help categorize search results, with recent results coming firstFact: date=April 2008.

Criticism

In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which claimed that they track 27.7 million blogs, failed to take into account MySpace blogs, of which she says there are 56 million. As a result, she says the utility of Technorati as a gauge for blog popularity is questionable. However by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace blogs.

In May 2006 Technorati teamed up with the PR agency Edelman. The deal earned a lot of criticism, both on principle and as a result of Edelman's 2006 fake blog scandals. Edelman and Technorati officially ended the deal in December 2006. That month, Oliver Reichenstein pointed out that the so called "State of the Blogosphere" was more of a PR-tool and money maker for Edelman and Technorati than a reliable source, explaining in particular a) why Technorati/Edelman's claim that "31% of the blogs are written in Japanese" was "bogus" and b) where the financial profit for the involved parties was in this.

In May 2007, Andrew Orlowski writing for the tech tabloid The Register criticized Technorati's May 2007 redesign. He suggests that Technorati has decided to focus more on returning image thumbnails rather than blog results. He also claims that Technorati never quite worked correctly in the past and that the alleged refocus is "a tacit admission that it's given up on its original mission".

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