Technorati's search engine traffic

Technorati's surging popularity was a mystery until somebody emailed over a link to a Google result. Check it yourself: plug in "Wikipedia" to the search box, and up comes a page all about the online encyclopedia from Technorati, in third position. Suddenly, it's all clear: Technorati's pages, on subjects such as Wikipedia, get plenty of links from the blogs it indexes; they have strong "Google juice", and so score highly in searches, particularly for technical words; no wonder, as embattled founder Dave Sifry recently boasted, the traffic to these "tag" pages is growing at a "torrid" pace. Google is Technorati's number one source of traffic. But there's a problem.

These themed pages are akin to search results; there is no original content, merely an aggregation of excerpts from the blogs that Technorati indexes, no more effectively than Google. And Google is a jealous search engine.

Says Mountain View's Vanessa Fox: "Typically, web search results don't add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index."

It's not as though Technorati will be suddenly booted from Google's index; it is highly unlikely Sifry adopted a calculated plan to pollute Mountain View's precious index with spam pages. Nevertheless, the Technorati founder should enjoy his Google bonanza; but he shouldn't expect it to last.

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