Monday, September 12, 2005

Niall Kennedy On Technorati Performance Issues

Last week I asked Niall Kennedy of Technorati a question about why 19 out of every 20 times I tried to see who was linking to MarketingShift in their posts I was greeted with the infamous error message. Niall had a pretty good analogy on why my site wasn't returning results. Although it's kind of humbling, because I'm not near as cool as I thought I was, it's still insightful and worth a share.

Question: Whenever I search for posts linking to www.marketingshift.com - my blog - 19 out of 20 times it gives me the message about the servers being busy but I have yet to experience it with that ratio on any other url I've tested. Would like to know if there is something I can do on my end to correct that behavior.

Niall's Answer:

"No, but thanks for asking. The timeout on a search for your blog is related to the performance of our URL search backend which is currently undergoing an overhaul to better serve and scale with the emerging blogosphere. Differences between URLs or over time are most likely due to the recency of a blog citation added to our index. It really depends on the level of activity around the URL. I like to think of it in terms of office organization. You have a bunch of papers and some sit on top of your desk and others are filed away in a filing cabinet. If you happen to be one of the newer documents to come across the organization stream you might be sitting somewhere on top of the desk for easy access and the query returns. Other times we have to go into the filing cabinet, which takes a bit longer and can timeout"

Although this doesn't solve my problem, it is a good explanation by Niall on how their process works and might help some of you feel better, or not. Basically, my blog isn't as popular as I'd like to think it is and thus not in Technorati's high priority queue. Perhaps landing a clothing sponsor will help out with my popularity, sha right!

By Jason Dowdell at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

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