What Happend To Technorati Charts?

One thing I'd like to know? Why did Technorati pull their charts in their latest release? Well, they didn't actually remove the service, but there aren't any links to it - at least, that I've seen. One possible reason for this is that their index appears to be slightly temporally challenged. Here is the chart for the term 'today' which you would imagine would be a pretty steady type of trend.

It looks like Technorati's recent memory is ok, but the long term memory isn't what it used to be...

So my guess is that either they removed the charts as they would have exposed this type of problem, or that they were planning on reducing the temporal width of their index for scalability reasons and the charts had to go as a consequence.

While the recent memory is more important for certain aspects of blog search - the long term index is something that can be used more aggresively for things like 'influence' or 'authority' (whatever they are).

Comments

[Ian Kallen]

Good catch, we are in fact transitioning our keyword search indices to better support system stability and some new features that are in the works. Stay tuned, I expect full recall to be restored but in the meantime (while most of our users are only accessing results from the recent timeframe) the charts will look a little funny.
cheers,
-Ian

[Matthew Hurst]

Ian,

Thanks for the update - appreciated.

Matt

[Pranam Kolari]

The fact that this went unnoticed for so long gives an interesting sense of their user-base/intent.