A key Technorati developer, Kevin Marks, has left the company and is now at Google, according to his blog. Just a month and a half ago Google took the lead as the top blog search engine from Technorait, and the loss of Marks to them is a further blow.
Technorati releases very little information to the public about itself, leaving us to mostly speculate on their financial health. This move could be a sign of trouble. If Technorati were a public company, this would be a good time to sell its stock short.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk.
Uh oh, who’s going to do the seo now
joke 
It’s sad though… I’m sure that he helped you guys a lot.
Well, since as you say, they disclose so little, it’s really hard to say… What I think is that instead of focusing in adding buzz features like WTF and so on they need to work harder on their core product: search. But again, only they know what people do when they go to Technorati, and therefore, they know where their focus should be. I’m just an outsider looking from very far away (well, not so far, I’m in Cupertino
What is he taking to Google? Technorati’s disfunctional search algorithms, a query parser that defaults to ORs instead of ANDs?
Technorati still has hope, in a quick sale to a media company that wants to be a deep influencer to the blogophere, but its gotta happen soon! Their CEO Hirshberg is a character and can pull something out of his bag of tricks if he focuses on it.
Technorati must have sent him to google so that google’s blogsearch will also suck. Technorati is bad at what it does. They are the pioneers but never took advantage of it.
I have never typed “technorati” into my address bar. All of their traffic must come from Boing Boing’s lack of comments. How’s that for a business model?
We wish the best for Kevin, and continuing success throughout his career.
As fro Technorati’s prospects, we are having a fantastic 2007 – We’ve been growing at a significant clip (sometimes causing us some new scaling issues of late) and our traffic, pageviews, visitors, and advertising impressions are all running at all-time records.
Even with all that, we still have lots to do, lots of new opportunities, and we have to keep making our core services (including search) better. There’s a lot to do there, and by no means do we have it 100% right. With regards to publicity, I personally prefer to focus on making Technorati better and focus on customer and partner wins (e.g. our recent PR Newswire deal, our recent Ogilvy partnership) and on our focus on innovation (like our new WTF feature, which I suggest you go have a look at, we’re constantly improving it) that are really relevant to the business, because in the end, it’s all about creating a great service for our users.
Dave
Dude, they didn’t “Lose” him. Sifry fired his ass because he never came to work and his spider was always broken. That’s what you get when you write key components in Python. The downside is they gave the spider code to Ian who is the worst developer on the planet and is responsible for their 99% downtime guarantee.
I think Technorati is indeed in trouble, partially because Sphere has come along and built a better mousetrap. I suspect that Sphere will soon be pushing Technorati out of their way as they become the premier blog search engine. Their widget for publishers is already becoming standard issue.
Wish we could attract him to help out at mediarati.com
Mike Arrington writes about “Google” being misspelled, but spells Technorati “Technorait” in his own article. Too funny!
Technorati is always a so-so product. IceRocket and Google BlogSearch seem more promising. I really wish Google improve their blog search product.
The problem may be this:
Technorati has raised how much VC money? Around $25 million?
Yahoo doesn’t seem to want them.
Google already has a blog search.
How *much* can a reasonable acquisition price be, if a buyer can even be found? That doesn’t leave a lot of money left over for anyone else after the VC’s.
It was a good try, but not every ticket wins the lottery.
Seth, that the more reason I think they should raise more money, buy mediarati .com and build it into the number one UGC site or social media
We will envy him man. Work in Google is much better than Technorati rite? What is the main source of income for Technorati?
I have no affiliation with Technorati. I agree Sphere has created a formidable competition for them with their widgets.
But, I think Technorati is currently focusing on building a real business focusing on revenues, which is a healthy growth stage for any startup.
Its normal for a hardcore technologist to leave at this stage as the core product is not the center of the company and his work may change to integration work with customers.
rampant speculation and criticism, rare fact. typical.
Bad for Google!
Now I think Google blog search engine will start sucking like the Technoarti that was used to suck.