Adam Hertz on Technorati Algorithm Tweaks. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox

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September 30, 2005

Adam Hertz on Technorati Algorithm Tweaks

Posted by Stowe Boyd

I recently suggested that Technorati must have introduced a tweak, at the very least, in their ranking algorithm. Adam Hertz responded to an email, saying that they had, and they were about to announce it. Yesterday, he posted the following:

[from Technorati Weblog: Site Performance and Improvement Update]
For URL search, we've been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we've made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.

This is a big change, since formerly technorati based blog rank on those links pulled from the "front page" of the 18.5M blogs they are tracking. Obviously, different blogs vary enormously in the halflife of front page posts. At Get Real, we keep only the last 17 days of posts on the front page. Somewhere else, they might keep 10 days of posts, or the last 20 posts, or whatever. Switching to the past six months, from my viewpoint, will lead to a real improvement, where those authors with the greatest long-term impact will have higher rankings, and those who have a brief spike in readership will not immmediately shoot up in the Technorati rankings.

So, this explains why Get Real's rank shot from 3,400 to 1,559. When you dig into the additional 5+ months of posts of 18M+ bloggers that Technorati was formerly ignoring, you will find an additional 1000+ posts linking to Get Real.

What is still missing? User selection of the period of time used, and a way to select specific areas of authority. The typical query would be -- if Technorati would support this -- "show me the top 100 bloggers on the topic of "social media" based on their posts in the past 12 months". We need to open the model so that user preferences drive the searches, not some canned algorithm. And since Technorati has gone so far with tags, why not use those to determine topic?

[tags: technorati, technorati+rank, adam+hertz]

Comments (36) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology

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1. Marshall Kirkpatrick on September 30, 2005 11:39 AM writes...

I wonder wether the technorati blog search box will then begin searching more than just the front page of whatever blog it's on.

BTW, your next article on Scoble has a broken permalink and can't be commented on.

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September 30, 2005

Adam Hertz on Technorati Algorithm Tweaks

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