I know this blog tends to “poke fun” at technorati a lot, but right now it deserves it.

After being told that Technorati was playing up (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/28/technorati-tech-support-needed/) I thought I would check it out myself and see what it produced.

Visiting the links about this blog page (obviously where my main interest lies 🙂 ), I thought I would check out what Technorati thought about other blogs which linked here and what it described the site’s profile as.

Trying the standard search which looks at blogs linking to a site (http://www.technorati.com/ search /http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog?cc=xrw7n395cr) was a total non-starter on IE. I tried this link (by clicking the link and by pasting it into the URL bar) several times, almost every time I got an odd windows error message saying “Operation Aborted” and IE returned to the about:blank page it likes so much. One time I got through, I ended up with a page which said “Sorry, no blogs link here.” Strange as at the top of the page it said “14 links from 6 blogs.”

Curiousity got to me and I checked the URL in Firefox. This was even stranger in some respects. I had a few page not founds then all of a sudden a hit! The page appeared but without the “Sorry, no blogs link here” malarky. Firefox claimed that while the site still had “14 links from 6 blogs” there were actually 19 links (Sorted by freshness) and then procedes to show 18.

Amazing.

I tried the “» View my profile” link but after ten attempts (five each IE 7 and FF2.0) which only got operation aborted or blank pages, I gave up. I don’t have that much patience even looking for pure hubris.

Well, if this is the face of Web 2.0, I cant wait for the bubble to burst.

My PC is often eccentric and Internet Explorer sometimes seems to have its own agenda, but the way Technorati has been behaving in the past few days defies even my capacity for denial.

I have managed to get it to behave normally about one in twenty tries. Almost all of the rest of the time it just dies on any search, giving the sort of useless error messages that might as well say “It’s broken. I have no idea either, sorry.” A few times, it manfully tried to give me search results but couldn’t sustain the effort beyond the first page and belatedly did the dying thing again.

Long after it has come into existence and disappeared, I read in MD that there the first online bodybuilding competition had been held. (Won by a lad in a weird blonde wig.)

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t the existence of Photoshop mean that anyone could win one of these competitions?

This blog complained in January 2006 about how bad search engines are. This post will raise that one by about a grand. If anything, they seem to be getting worse.

I had offered to try to find someone’s email address online. Assuming the person was too canny to put their real name (to avoid spam) but might give some signs of their presence in forums and so on, I tried various search methods. The first thing that I discovered was that there seem to be no legitimate directories in which you can find people. Where there used to be White pages and People finders, there are basically none worth using. I can see that spam has made people unwilling to leave their email addresses ripe for the plucking but this seems ridiculous.

I did straight searches for the name (quite an unusual one) and found one forum post containing this name in Google. I continued searching using other search engines and what you would assume to be more productive versions of the name, (such as just the first initial and surname) and actually found that even the forum post that I had found the first time wasn’t brought up by any other searches.

So experimentally, I tried searching for other names, including the name of someone who I know was found through the Internet by an old school friend a couple of years ago, when the internet was clearly a much more naive and open place. No results. I then tried searching for a name that had appeared in this blog. I found this blog but only a cached version. I did not find the article to which the blog had linked, although this is still available online.

So, to test Google, I searched for the headline of the article to which I had referred. I enclosed the text in quotes to stop it from bringing up its first choices – a string of web addresses where any of the words appeared anywhere in any order. (The blog article had came up on page 2) No results, this time, except for where the headline was quoted in this blog – cache version only.

Not believing my eyes, given that I had the article open in front of me in Internet Explorer, I assume that the site for which I was searching is just not indexed by Google. It is a local newspaper site for a pretty sizeable UK city. It gets public funding. Can it really have been so inept in its SEO practice that Google can’t see it? Are googlebots so inadequate that they can’t see a site which supplies many GB of text?

The article is nearly a year old. I thought that maybe Google feels impelled to cache anything this old to save its search time. However, this doesn’t explain why most of the presented results went back 7 years and came from very obscure rural journals, when I put a couple of phrases from the headline in quotes.

There are lots of sources online that claim to have some idea about the logic that underlies Google (et al) ‘s search methods. Bullsh. There is no logic to it, as far as I can see, after empirical testing.

Tragically, search engines are not just getting poorer at delivering meaningful results, they are increasingly clones of each other, so that you get the same garbage, in the same order, from half a dozen. There must be a solution?