Is Technorati broken?

July 28, 2005 9:08 AM

Is Technorati broken? I have used it in the past to see who is linking to something, but now it misses even MetaFilter links.

At least as of about ten minutes ago it did not catch the following MetaFilter links:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html
[posted here]

http://marketrac.nyse.com/mt/index.html
[posted here]

http://www.draftruss.com/
[posted here]


If it doesn't find a link on MetaFilter what else is it missing?

posted by caddis to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Disclaimer: I only sort of know what I am talking about.

My anecdotal opinion is that it's broken, or rather it's never been totally working right. Since the xmlrpc problem [which I only sort of understand] sprung up with WordPress blogs there are a lot of web hosts that have disabled xmlrpc which, I think, causes some of these problems. Server overload causes others. I find that clicking through to my Technorato links via my WordPress dashboard about half the time lately I get some variant of the "our server is overloaded" message. Even when I ping them directly via their web page with my updated pages, it can take days for the posts to even show up.

So, I see what you are describing, but I'm not sure of the reason for it, those are my ideas.
posted by jessamyn at 11:01 AM on July 28, 2005

Maybe mefi needs to contact them.
posted by webmeta at 11:01 AM on July 28, 2005

"My anecdotal opinion is that it's broken, or rather it's never been totally working right."

I agree -- I have had similar Technorati problems for ages. But unfortunately, I can't suggest a fix.
posted by litlnemo at 1:37 PM on July 28, 2005

I emailed them and their response was that they rely on pings for timely updates. I submitted a ping at a about the same time and now the first two links above are showing up. Perhaps Matt needs to automate pings somehow. I am going to forward the response from Technorati on to him. Of course, that doesn't help with all the other sites.
posted by caddis at 2:22 PM on July 28, 2005

Technorati hasn't scaled very well, in my opinion. I don't think I've tried a query in months that didn't either time out or take more than 30 seconds to come back. Maybe they use JRUN too.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:49 PM on July 28, 2005

I've never had a search time out or anything, but I have had searches miss results, like caddis has. Dunno what's up with that.
posted by danb at 7:20 PM on July 28, 2005