Comments on: Meeting Google and Technorati founders on the Same Day

By: Brian Gilley

Brian Gilley — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 01:57:39 +0000

Interesting read on search, wi-fi, and especially the differences currently between Google and Technorati.

I agree with several of your points that Google’s search has become very saturated. If you are a common, everyday user without the use of advanced operators to use within your searches, then you could easily lose time, focus, and perhaps any relevance when searching for your particular query. Technorati is way more focused, although they face a much more prevalent problem of spam and the new “splogs,” which I hope they are working diligently to stop as they push forward.

I would like to point out though for your comments on legalities as well as another comment about a person’s rights as it pertains to their site (or snippets thereof) being included in Google’s search results.

It’s been a long known fact that if you didn’t want your site, pages, or any section of your site crawled, then you should include that in your robots.txt file. We use it regularly with certain sites. Therefore, I do not think that a site owner’s rights to not be included should be enforced by any legal body. It seems that common sense and the “realm” of the Internet and search engines has always been that if you build a site, it will eventually get crawled, at least pieces of it. I think that no violation has occurred in this sense because search engines have always given the “users” ample ways of opting out.

On a side note, I do love Technorati for their timliness of information, accuracy versus Google, and the speed of their results overall.

Also, I’m jealous that you got to meet with two of perhaps the best Internet companies on the planet. Must’ve been some “intense” conversations as you put it. But I’m sure well worth it if it leads you to greener pastures

By: Karl-Friedrich Lenz

Karl-Friedrich Lenz — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 12:45:15 +0000

I think that Google should indeed only include pages in their index the authors want expressly included (opt-in model).

I also happen to think that current copyright already requires this and the opt-out model Google is now running with is quite illegal, as might well be confirmed in one of the copyright lawsuits running against Google right now.

It was interesting to learn from your post that it might actually make sense from a pure search business point of view (e.g. completely ignoring copyright requirements) as well to go with opt-in.

By: Paul Jardine

Paul Jardine — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:00:58 +0000

You’re right when you say that Google drowns you in thoroughness. This is becoming the disease of the web. Something like 18,000 blogs are created every day (or was it minute?), and our ability to find the needles in the haystack is being eroded.
My view on this is that community will determine what is relevant and what is not, but that Technorati, although a community, does not provide the level of intimacy that will eventually be required. I’m working on it…

By: Ozh

Ozh — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 07:16:33 +0000

“google copies the internet every 2 weeks” ??
Whenever I update any of my websites, changes are shown in Google’s search results less than 48 hours later, and a few hours later when changes occured on XML feed enabled blogs.

By: Niall Kennedy

Niall Kennedy — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 16:20:34 +0000

Thank you for the kind words! Regarding your last point on open WiFi, Microsoft has already bought data on WiFi points by geolocation here in the U.S. and uses that data to tell a user of their mapping service where they are located.

On a more comical note, there used to be an open WiFi node in San Francisco’s Cole Valley neighborhood called “105 Carl, bring beer.” The node is now WEP-enabled and the node is now just named “105 Carl.” I guess nobody brought beer.