Technorati

The search engine that ranked the blogosphere, whose Authority score every blogger checked daily, quietly switched off in 2014 when the conversation moved to Twitter

Shut down
19902026

Technorati was a search engine for blogs, founded by David Sifry in 2002, which indexed the links between them and turned that into the Authority score and the Technorati Top 100. For most of the decade it was how bloggers found out who was linking to them and where they stood. It claimed to track over 100 million blogs at its peak. Blog search and the rankings were switched off in May 2014, the API in 2017, and the site as people knew it was gone by 2020.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2002
  2. November 2002 Launch
    Technorati starts indexing blogs
  3. 2005
  4. 2005 Feature
    Tags and the Top 100
  5. 2008
  6. 2008 Peak
    Tracking about 133 million blogs

    From the State of the Blogosphere report.

  7. 2014
  8. May 2014 Shutdown
    Blog search, Authority and the Top 100 are removed

    No announcement.

  9. 2016
  10. 2016 Acquisition
    Synacor buys what is left
  11. 2017
  12. 2017 Decline
    The API is switched off

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: technorati.com, 1 June 2006 →

Browse technorati.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Technorati, Inc. 2002–2016 Founded Founded by David Sifry
Synacor 2016–2014 Acquisition, $3M Bought the remains for a reported $3 million

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Technorati removed blog search, the Authority score and the Top 100 in May 2014 without a farewell post, keeping only the advertising network it had become. The API was switched off in 2017 and the last public parts of the site were gone by 2020. Synacor bought what remained of the company in 2016 for about $3 million.

Our analysis: Technorati indexed links between blogs at the exact moment that linking between blogs was how the web talked to itself. When the conversation moved to Twitter and Facebook, the signal it measured stopped existing: people stopped writing posts that linked to other posts and started retweeting instead. Google Blog Search then did the indexing for free and better, and Technorati was left selling advertising against a ranking nobody needed. The lesson is not that it was outcompeted but that the thing it measured evaporated underneath it.

History [edit]

Counting who linked to whom

David Sifry started Technorati in November 2002 as a way to answer one question: who is linking to me? It crawled blogs, followed their links, and produced two numbers that came to matter more than they should have. Authority counted how many distinct blogs had linked to yours in the last six months. The Top 100 listed the blogs with the most of it, and the people on that list checked their position the way shopkeepers check the weather.

Around it grew the rest of the blogosphere plumbing: tags, blog reactions, the What is Everyone Talking About charts, and the State of the Blogosphere reports that gave journalists a number to cite. In 2008 Technorati said it was tracking 133 million blogs. Being high in Technorati was, for a few years, the definition of mattering online.

The links stopped

Then the writing moved. A conversation that used to be five blog posts linking to each other became a Twitter thread with no links at all, and Facebook kept its links private by default. The metric Technorati was built on thinned out. Google Blog Search indexed the same material for nothing, blog search became a commodity, and the company turned into an advertising network with a search engine attached.

In May 2014 the search, the Authority score and the Top 100 disappeared from the site, with no announcement. Bloggers noticed when their widgets stopped working. Synacor bought the remains in 2016 for around $3 million, the API was retired in 2017, and by 2020 there was nothing left to visit.

The domain today

technorati.com is a small advertising and tech news site with no connection to the index. The State of the Blogosphere reports survive only in the Internet Archive.

Similar projects

DMOZ The web, catalogued by hand 1998–2017 AltaVista Search, before Google 1995–2013 Infoseek One of the first big web search engines, Netscape's default for a year, bought by Disney and buried inside Go.com 1995–2001 ICQ The messenger that gave you a number 1996–2024 Skype The app that made calling the world free 2003–2025 Winamp It really whips the llama's ass 1997–2013

Sources [edit]

  1. RIP Technorati blog search and rankings Search Engine Land 23 May 2014 [archived]
  2. Google vs. Technorati: the great blog search war Tedium 4 November 2022
  3. Technorati and the inevitable sadness of death The Blog Herald 1 January 2024
  4. Techmeme leaderboard attacks Technorati's last stronghold TechCrunch 30 September 2007 [archived]

Last verified: 20 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).