Technorati has retained New York-based James and Company to conduct a CEO search for the company. For the last few weeks, the firm has been reaching out to potential candidates in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to gauge their interest in leading the nearly four year old company. No word on whether founder and current CEO Dave Sifry will take a new position at the company or will move on to something else. it’s also possible, of course, that no suitable candidate will be found to replace Sifry.
Technorati’s stats have been largely up recently, although a number of distribution deals they currently have in place may be in jeopardy. Employees of the company were reportedly told about the CEO search last week.
Technorati is the largest blog search engine, with blogsearch.google.com taking the second spot. Of course, Google is indexing blogs much more regularly today than they were even a year ago – suggesting that Google’s main search engine at Google.com is most likely Technorati’s biggest direct competitor.
Technorati has not yet responded to an email request for comment. Rumors of a CEO search at Technorati were first reported by Valleywag.
Update: My inquiry to Dave Sifry has prompted him to write a blog post on the matter. He says he’ll remain with the company in a product role. This strikes me as a sensible move.
First. Let’s be honest. The largest blog search engine is google.com !
Second. Technorati is four years old. As far as founder CEOs go Sifry has had a long run. It’s only normal that they find a new CEO.
I’m fully planning to bring in a new one at Tailrank in about 1-2 years once things mature.
Heck. Hiring a CEO is literally the first thing I did when I started Rojo.
Onward!
Kevin – wasn’t Chris Alden, the CEO of Rojo, your cofounder?
The truth is…someone needs to buy Technorati to take them to the next level. The downtimes are too many, the email responses too slow and phone support (although wishful thinking) nonexistent. The webiste, I think, also needs a makeover.
I don’t even use Technorati much, but I am rooting for them to do a good enough job to continue doing well. Hope the search goes well.
Yes…… Chris was technically a co-founder. The point I was making is that I wanted to bring in a dedicated CEO *first* thing and that Technorati bringing in a new CEO isn’t exactly a testament for or against Dave.
I should have phrased it differently.
So finally the Mating Dance has been confirmed.
Adrian: YESSSSS!!!!!
My opinion is google should purchase Technorati.
Google already have a good blog search engine. May be it is a good target for yahoo or microsoft or ask or some on battling for search engine market share.
OHH YES
thnk you
In my opinion, David Sifry has done an excellent job in offering transparency, both through his blog and in his comments on blogs everywhere discussing his company. He hasn’t appeared arrogant about owning the CEO role or in marketing himself as an individual. Technorati, despite Google’s best intentions, continues to lead in this space, and only has the occasional bumps in stability, which are occuring less over time. A change like this can be expected as a startup moves from technology leader to market leader, but dancing on their collective graves is the wrong approach, I believe.
Technorati is a money pit. They dont release info about their funding b/c they have raised a ton of money and have made basically nothing. I have talked to several employees (past and present) that confirm they lose their shorts every year and Sifry was just waiting until they could sell the site. With close to zero revenue and 40+ employees they really arent a very attractive acquisition target.
The VC’s want someone who has a better plan for getting a return on their money.
Great CEO, but they really need to move on to the next chapter… and get more funding. There is still lots to do at Technorati before it is too late.
I thought Peter Hirshberg ran the shop! He is always ranting good word on the speaking circuit and seems to me on top of things as a CEO. Sifry is raw goods.
As a former Technorati-ite (employee 13) I have to say Dave was one of the most amazing people to work for and what he’s done over there is a testament to how a small group of people with the right leader can build something remarkable. I hope they find a great fit and let Dave get his hands dirty again since that’s where I think his real passion lies and not to mention he’s really really good at it
Rock on TR and good luck in the search!
#8 Vikram – as I noted the other day, Google has absolutely no need (or reason) to purchase Techno. Dave came out with a statement that really needed clarification – unfortunately my request to speak with someone at Technorati has not been responded to.
It seems like a good place to work and #15 former employee says the same. Technorati should stick to “authority” instead of the search.
i think he is right
Let’s go down the buyers:
1) Google doesn’t want Technorati because it they already have their own blog search
2) Yahoo doesn’t want Technorati because it costs too much?
3) Microsoft – probably the best potential buyer, they’re way behind in search and don’t really have anything worthwhile. And they can pay a high price. It could happen.
A purchase of Technorati would be about more than blog search…try Microformats. And frankly, Microformats fit exactly with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information. The question is how to get MF’s adopted across the new web publishing landscape to increase their value…
Technorati sucks.
Slow, slow, slow!
Terrible customer support
They contradict their own results. Inaccurate as always!
Lately I’ve been seeing a large amount of RSS feeds returned in Google’s search results. I’m not sure how this ties into their blog indexing, it seems like more people would be linking to actual articles instead of the feed content.
Here’s an example search I just did recently which has the wordpress RSS tag feed returned first in my results:
http://www.goog...imit+per+script
Nobody want Techno; therefore Ask will take them and make it worse than it already is.
Interesting, esp in light of his recent “state of the live web”…I smell major changes
Technorati a media company? I don’t see it. It’s just a blog search company, and it sucks at that, although that’s probably not their fault, since keeping up with the amount of blog spam out there is impossible.
As for Tailrank, if it weren’t for Kevin Burton’s incessant spamming of the Techcrunch comments, nobody would have ever heard of it. Who uses Tailrank?
I predict an acquisition by Microsoft or Yahoo! in the next 12 months. They both need a product like Technorati to compete with Google.
Google should definitely swipe up Technorati. Who cares that they already have blog search? They already had Google Video when they bought YouTube (though the merits of that purchase are debated). And this would give them a crushing stranglehold on this niche. I wonder if anti-trust legislation applies to blog search engines…
Cool the leader has to be choosen very carefully as the future revenues and bottomline depends on the ingenuity of leaders to provide regular growth impetus to the company.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
I tried Technorati a few times but generally couldn’t find what I wanted (perhaps it was too technical), while at Google’s Blog Search I had much more luck (though still not great).
Its a little hard knowing that your main competitor is google, who like Microsoft before them, has more money than G-d. Its especially hard knowing that their focusing on your bread and butter. Technorati has worked well for me and the market can support muliple players, but potential profitability may suffer in the long-term.
I don’t get it.
Technorati sucks big time, many readers seem to agree with me. When it’s not down or too slow, it has always provided me with useless results.
How is it possible that it is still alive… for FOUR years now?!? Who are these people that use it on a regular basis (apparently they exist)? Bad services end up in the dead pool — why isn’t this one???
Dont agree to the dead pool for technorati. Some people are looking for other stuff than what Google gives every day. If you want to be surprised, find new informations, you need to go one blogs. Even if, there are -by definition – much more useless things in those place
Before searching as CEO Technorati must find an adeguate support team.
Try to visit their support website. A lot of peoples, like me, without assistance.
http://support.technorati.com/