The Fall of Technorati

Blog search engine Technorati announced that David Sifry, CEO and eight other employees are no longer with the company. Sifry said, "Technorati isn't a place for idea-making any longer. It's reached its "revenue-stage," which Sifry said "strikes me with a bit of sadness."

Technorati's fate was sealed when Google Blog search entered the space. Googles' vast crawlers have become a hugh competitive advantage as they crawl the web and index and organize the same information much faster that competitors can. With thousands of blogs posted every hour and 100,000 new blogs being created daily, indexability of blogs has become a huge cost. It affects timeliness of posts and ultimately readership. If user can search and find blogs on Google before other places the it eventually errods the market share of other blog search engines.

Also, as Sifry, pointed out its "revenue-stage". Technorati will have to figure our a way to monetize blog search. Google's on the other hand can offer blog search as a loss leader as it primary revenue comes from source other than blogs search.

If Microsoft was smart they would buy Technorati while it still has a large market share and pump in the resources to needed to stay ahead of the curve. Or are they waiting for Google to amass a 90% market share, then realise that it is a business worth pursuing and spend like drunken sailors to play catch up?

Stay tuned, that is to the blogsphere.