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JULY 27, 2005
Tracking the Blogs CEO Technorati David Sifry talks about the prospect of big-name competition and the challenge of the blogosphere's hand-over-fist expansion David Sifry, 36, has made a career of jumping from one tech startup to the next. He was chief technology officer of LinuxCare, a company that provided service and support to users of the open source operating system, and later co-founded wireless Internet outfit Sputnik. Sifry's most recent role is CEO of Technorati, the popular blog search engine he co-launched in 2002. Technorati allows users to search blogs for specific content and monitor which blogs are the most popular. But with rumors that big boys Google (GOOG ), Yahoo! (YHOO ), and MSN (MSFT ) are soon to enter blog search, the blogosphere is abuzz with speculation that Technorati can't compete. Some users find the search engine taking as much as 30 seconds to spit back results, and when millions of Web searchers flocked to Technorati following the July 7 London bombings, the site had difficulty handling all the traffic. Sifry maintains these challenges are inherent to blog search, not indicative of his small company's inability to keep pace. He recently spoke with BusinessWeek intern Dana Goldstein. Following are edited excerpts of their conversation. Q: You say you welcome competition from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, should they decide to offer blog search. Why would you welcome such Net heavyweights as rivals? A: The larger question is, is it really competition? I look at what Google and Yahoo and other companies in this space are doing, and they're really fantastic at helping you pick out what's the best reference site for something. You go to Google and type in wine, and it will tell you the best places to buy wine. But if you really want to find out what the world's leading wine experts are talking about, Google isn't really built to do that. Q: Why can't they build themselves up to do that with a blog search engine? A: Well, good luck. We've been doing it now for almost three years, and it's a lot harder than you think. Doing it on a small scale is not terribly difficult. Doing it to scale becomes pretty hard, and every day the blogosphere is growing by leaps and bounds. The blogosphere today is about 30 times as big as it was three years ago. So just to give you some ideas on what that means: Every single day we're seeing about 80,000 new people who are starting blogs. And we're seeing about 900,000 new posts every single day. So that's about 11 posts every single second that you've got to now index, you've got to score it, you've got to make sense out of all of its relevance, and you've got to push it to your servers really, really fast so people can stay up to date with what's going on. Q: Does Technorati have the technological capability to push blog searches through to servers fast enough to keep users happy? Users are used to doing incredibly fast Web searches through traditional search engines. A: We've built what's called a streaming architecture, as opposed to a polling architecture. We don't actually go out and crawl the entire Internet. We're built into every single publishing platform. So instead of crawling the Web, we literally get notified when new stuff is created or when stuff is updated or deleted. We have an entire search scheme that takes under seven minutes to complete. Q: You say Google can't tell you what wine experts are talking about, but Technorati can. How do you do that? A: When you think about the words that we use when we talk about the Web, we talk about pages, we talk about documents, we talk about directories. What does that mean, the language, the metaphor we use when we think about the Web today? Q: It's a print culture metaphor. A: Exactly. But there's a long way to go. We're really trying to do something a little different from that. What Technorati is trying to do is looking at the Web in a different way. And the way that I like to think of it is, it's like this big river, it's like this conversation flow. It's about people and conversations. Just as Google invented page rank, reordering the way that we sort the Web, what we did was say, "O.K., why don't we take the same idea and apply it to people." So the way that Technorati calculates what we call "Net attention" is we look at how many people are linking to you.
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