Technorati Woes 17 years, 10 months ago by Martey Dodoo
It is 4am in the morning. Nobody is using the Internet. What happens when I do a search on popular blog search engine Technorati?
The above error message admit that something is wrong. Occasionally when trying to search, Technorati will claim that there are zero results, even on common words like "Bush," "blogging," and "Apple."
There are two reasons that Technorati's technical issues annoy me. The first is that I feel compelled to use it. While I have tried several other search engines that claim to index blogs, I have found that Technorati has the best results. For all practical intents and purposes, Technorati is the Google of blog search engines, beating even Google's own Blog Search.
The second (and far more important) reason is that I get the impression that nobody at Technorati actually cares. When you submit a support request at Technorati's website, it sends you a form response in reply:
Dear Technorati User,Thank you for taking the time to drop us a line. If you are reporting a problem you may be having you will be contacted by a support technician once we have had a chance to review your message.
If you don't hear back from anyone within a few business days then please let us know and be sure to include the subject and ticket number, "[Feedback] Error report #34163], " in your note so we may properly track your issue and its progress.
Since October 2004, I have contacted Technorati for technical support eight times.[1] They have gotten back to me twice. Once was in December 2004. The other time was in October 2005, in response to a request that I had sent in early September. This latter response made me feel like Technorati cared, since it was fielded by the CEO himself, Dave Sifry. He apologized for the long time it took to get back to me, noting it was because they were "understaffed in support."
Then they hired more customer service people. From my point of view, however, nothing has changed. Despite the claims of Technorati's auto-reply that a technician will get in touch, my experience has been that this does not happen. If there was no expectation of personalized service, then the lack of response would not be an issue. As it stands now, Technorati's customer service is simply unprofessional.
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[1] This number does not include suggestions for new Technorati features.