It seems the Why Don’t You…? opinion that Technorati is mad is more widely shared than we had previously realised. (“Technorati Suffering?,” “Technorati – Tech Support Needed” and “Technorati Oddities – Again” are three recent examples)

Reading through the Register’s RSS feeds I found this today “Google overtakes Technorati,” in which the Register outlines research from HitWise inc. This research seems to show that Google’s blog search is vastly outstripping Technorati in results returned and usability. The article also shows screen shots from a search for Dr.Who in Google and Technorati. In the article, Google returns over 40,000 hits, while Technorati shows zero.

Just to confirm (and in the interests of scientific repeatability), we have run the tests again here with almost identical results. You can see for yourself: http://technorati.com/search/dr.who or http://www.google.co.uk/blogsearch?hl=en&q=dr.who. (It may change now this blog exists though!)

In the interests of fair play, we must point out that with different search terms you get different results (for example “Richard Dawkins” produces almost the same number in both engines). However the Google interface is much faster than Technorati and seems (this is currently totally unconfirmed) to be more up to date.

Can Technorati survive this? Time will tell. (Will it ever be possible to use “Google Tags?”)