Jeremy Wright: Technorati used to brag about posts being in the index in 7 minutes. If the time difference was nearly 60 times slower than it used to be. [cut] Technorati’s index is both slow, and it’s crap. [cut] inaccurate. It’s lucky if it shows 10% of the results that PubSub, Bloglines and Blogpulse show. It’s also a SLOW site. Response times of 1 minute aren’t uncommon, and even then results sometimes simply aren’t shown. [cut] They’ve failed the blogosphere. It’s time to own up to that, ask for help, and get people who actually know how to do this stuff in to help them out
Randy: About two years ago, I was in contact with David Sifry and Kevin Marks and tried to convince them that their approach was flawed, would not scale and offered them a better approach. They didn't believe me and stuck to their guns. I now have mixed emotions, partly glad that my predicted dire came true and partly sad that they are beyond screwed.
Randy
You telling me they use PHP, Perl or Python to index their pages?
Randy
Randy
Thanks for the interesting thoughts and feedback. Sorry that things haven't been working very well for you of late. Listening to your users is a hard discipline to get used to, but boy is it great. And it has helped us to understand ourselves better, as well as more deeply understand what you and our other users want.
So, we rolled up our sleeves and went to work. We just rolled out a bunch of bug fixes and performance improvements, please do go and have a look at the site and try out some searches. Not everything is consistently fast, and there are still some searches that time out, but things should be significantly better than before...
And we're going to continue to work and improve and focus on being of service to you and our other fantastic users.
Dave
Randy