Ouch.
My apologies again, Teresa. We are working on restoring responsiveness to the URL-driven search. We have greatly improved the performance of text search recently, and URL search is next.

Posted August 31, 2005 2:55 PM by Kevin Marks

Kevin, I've been rooting hard for Technorati to pull it together, but it's been a long time since I've gotten useful information there. Currently it's stuck on telling me that I've only had four inbound links in the last two days, which is far from true; but each time I ask, it gives me a different set of four links, and not all of them are from the last two days, or for that matter the last two weeks.

I'm not giving up on you guys, but for now I have to go where I can get results that significantly resemble the actual situation.

Posted August 31, 2005 3:16 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

To be honest, there was only one useful thing I ever got from Technorati, namely the "who's linking to me?" vanity surf. That still sort-of works, though it's often slow to update, and slower to load.

I'm not overly impressed with Icerocket's offerings in that area.

Posted August 31, 2005 4:00 PM by Chad Orzel

I'm finding IceRocket much more reliable on that score.

Granted, there's an element of vanity in looking at one's inbound links -- egoscanning, as the fanzine community calls it -- but they let me know which posts people enjoyed or found useful, and which fell flat.

For example, during the first day or so of Hurricane Katrina, I couldn't tell whether my collected links to informative sites were doing anyone any good. According to Technorati, I might as well not have bothered; but my site counter's list of URLs from which visitors were coming in told me otherwise.

Posted August 31, 2005 4:21 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

TNH: No referrer log analysis?

Posted August 31, 2005 4:25 PM by cd

Referrer log can show who viewed your site coming from someplace else, but not necessarily all the places links to your site exist.

Just because somebody writes "via Lis" doesn't mean anybody follows the link to show up on referrer logs. But it's still useful (or at least interesting) to know where and how your name appears.

Posted August 31, 2005 4:35 PM by Lis Riba

Thanks so much for posting about us and using our blog search. We welsome suggestions from everyone, so feel free to contact me anytime.

Blake Rhodes
IceRocket.com
rhodes@icerocket.com

Posted August 31, 2005 5:43 PM by Blake Rhodes

Thanks, Teresa -- it's nice to do a search and get a response other than "Sorry" (which is what I've been getting from Technorati more often than not for the past several weeks.)

Posted August 31, 2005 7:17 PM by Zed

Remember all those useful things Technorati used to do?

Nope. I don't remember Technorati ever doing much of anything except timing out.

Posted August 31, 2005 7:34 PM by sennoma

Using this, I've found a few links to me and my Blog that I never realized exist. More people read my little blog than I thought, not that its more than a handful in any case.

Posted August 31, 2005 8:53 PM by Paul

"Vanity surfing" was also my main use for technorati, but unfortunately, I'm getting very little from icerocket. (One hit, which includes my URL in the body text). Is there some bit of query syntax I'm missing?

Posted August 31, 2005 10:31 PM by Charles Dodgson

I'm with Dodgson. None of the handful of sites that I know link to me were listed via the obvious searches (Skwid, The Humblest Blog, etc.), although I did find a couple of LJ links I didn't know about.

Posted September 1, 2005 2:21 PM by Skwid

Dave goes into more detail about what we're doing here

Posted September 1, 2005 4:58 PM by Kevin Marks

I still use Technorati, but I use Feedster, Blogpulse, and IceRocket, too. I notice that Feedster seems a bit more comprehensive. Bigger search index size? *Shrug.* Since I don't know why, I'll refrain from speculating

Posted September 1, 2005 11:11 PM by Lisa Williams

In the Blog Search news area, Google is now in the game. Of course, *my* blog's not in it, either...but it still looks like a promising tool.

Posted September 14, 2005 2:43 PM by Skwid

ick.

Posted October 22, 2005 4:17 PM by Xopher finds comment spam.