Dave Kellam

Technorati is sluggish — been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always managed to find a few links that others services haven’t. To be fair, other services produce results that Technorati doesn’t, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Kottke wrote about it, so everyone else needs to weigh in (it’s kind of fun using the service to track people bitching about it).

One of the site’s core problems is bloat. You think it would be obvious that size doesn’t matter when it comes to indexing weblogs. Quality, not quantity. Take a look at Technorati, they whip out their big numbers and slap ’em down on the top of the page. Over 16.1 millions blogs and 1.4 billion posts indexed. Pretty impressive eh? I bet that earns them all an extra glance at all the cool nerd parties.

Now, let’s try to come up with a solution that reduces the number of sites in the index, speeds up searches and returns more valuable results. Sounds like a bit of a tough one. So, lets take a look at a diagram (actually a screen capture, but diagram sounds better). Do you see any big problems? Maybe BlogSpot? Five of the last seven are AdWords abuse/spam sites. I’m not sure how valuable 16.1 million weblogs are when you have crap like this around.

Don’t get me wrong, I have friends that use BlogSpot, it’s a nice easy way to get started online and maintain a simple weblog. Something has to change though. I’m sure Google is aware of the problem, it’s probably screwing up their index too.

How do we fix it? Technically, it’s a problem on Google’s end — they own Blogger and should do something about so many fake sign-ups. In the short-term, Technorati could remove BlogSpot from the index, it’s a bit of a blanket solution but it could help speed things up . Although, it probably wouldn’t help them in terms of Google buying out the service. On the other hand, Yahoo might appreciate the damage to its rival. It doesn’t even have to be a full-out ban on whatever.blogspot addresses, maybe just have a holding period or a number of links to their site from non-BlogSpot addresses.

This Cringely article mostly deals with Google and the possibility of the company being at an apex (although without much substance or willingness to go out on a limb). He goes on to explain the Google is doing their own thing and probably not looking to be a Microsoft killer, instead pointing at Apple as the likely culprit. The kicker of an idea is at the end:

Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version — OS 10.4 — on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?

It wouldn’t kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn’t hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple’s store.

That could be fun. The idea sounds plausible but it probably won’t happen. Then again, Apple switching to Intel was never supposed to happen either. I could see Apple releasing an older version of os x that runs on any Intel hardware and making /home/user directories easily portable on the iPod.

Here’s a chunk of code for WordPress that will display a custom message on posts older than a certain date. You might ask, “Why would I need such a thing?” And I’d say you probably don’t but if the post is older than 60 days and not a monthly archive, the person has likely arrived via search engine or permalink.

So, who cares if someone is arriving via search engine? Well, they probably won’t stick around after you’ve given them their tidbit of information. However, you could direct them towards your site’s main page, some other content or even display some AdWords or other advertising (thus avoiding a hit to your loyal readers).

It’s a relatively straight-forward chunk of php code. You’ll probably want to put it in your post template, sandwiched between the function that displays content and the one that displays comments.

<?php 
	$entry_datetime = abs(strtotime($post->post_date)); 
	$time_since = time() - $entry_datetime;   
	$days_since = 60;
	if ($time_since > $days_since * 86400) :
?> 		
 <div class="message-age">
  ## Modify this message
  <p>This entry is more than 60 days old.</p>
 </div>
<?php endif; ?>

This code is GPLd, do whatever you want with it. You could have it display a different message for a post that’s a year old or two years old.

If there’s interest, I can turn this into a simple WordPress plugin but it doesn’t seem overly necessary.