Technorati, the blog search and advertising network, is taking their search engine and giving it a fresh restart.  Technorati has been rewiring their infrastructure over the last six months.  The old crawler will be retired.  While most of the blogs have been migrated already, there are still a few left to index.

“We’ve been moving large portions of blogs during the past two weeks and still have a lot to go. The large scale shift has put some strain on our crawl queues and data management systems during this wave of updates,” stated Dorion Carroll, VP of Engineering at Technorati.  “The big push has resulted in slower times to index than usual. We’re working hard to keep the new posts coming in and expect the majority of the backlog to be sorted out during this next week. We appreciate your patience. I think you’ll like the results when everything is converted.”

Technorati uses tags that are linked to blog posts.  Technorati claims that they index about 27.7 million blogs.  ReadWriteWeb points out that Technorati has been receiving some attention for their inability to crawl and index blogs efficiently.  ReadWriteWeb also pointed out that their blog had not been indexed in 23 hours even though they published 10 posts.

No other information has been posted about what features the new Technorati search engine will have.  When the new Technorati is released, check back here.

Technorati is a blog search engine and advertisement network that competes with several industries. In the analytics space, Technorati competes with Google Analytics, Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. In the blog search sector, Technorati competes with Google Blog Search, Live.com, Yahoo.com, and Ask.com. In the advertising online sector, Technorati competes with thousands of companies.

Technorati has raised over $30 million thus far and is now getting in the acquisition spirit. Technorati has acquired Blogcritics.org. Blogcritics.org is a blog network that started about 6 years ago. BlogCritics is a network of knowledgeable blog writers that publish stories regarding specific subjects. Over the course of the past 6 years, about 2,300 authors published 73,000 articles according to TechCrunch.

Technorati plans on integrating BlogCritics into their Media division. Below is an excerpt from Richard Jalichandra on the Technorati blog. Jalichandra is the President and CEO of Technorati.

What’s in it for us? Blogcritics brings us closer to an open community of bloggers and the audience that follows them. It also gives us a lot more advertising inventory. What’s in it for them? Our combined resources will help that community grow and expose their work to an even wider audience. We’ll also work more closely with Blogcritics authors so they can monetize their own blogs. What’s in it for our advertisers? They’ll be able to run more fully integrated programs across the site and its related blogs.

Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry. BlogCritics was founded by Eric Olsen and Philip Win. Both will be joining Technorati in San Francisco, Calif.

Related Links:
1. blogcritics.org
2. Technorati
3. TechCrunch
4. Technorati Blog

The blog search and ranking company, Technorati has officially launched Technorati Media.  Technorati Media is a competitor of Glam and Federated Media.  Last week, Technorati raised $7.5 million as part of their planned $10 million Series D round of funding. 

Technorati Media will be officially launching at 9AM Pacific Time today.  Technorati has tested the new service on BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, NerdApproved, and GeekAlerts.  Some of Technorati Media’s customers include Microsoft, Sun, Sony, Visa, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal, Fox, Best Buy, etc.

Currently Technorati Media will only be open to the large blogs, but they will be open to the smaller ones in 3 months or so.  Tony Pribyl was hired on recently as the VP of Sales for Technorati and Jennifer McLean is Technorati’s new marketing lead.  McLean came from Glam. 

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media by Michael Arrington

 

Sifry launched Technorati in 2002.  The name, Technorati is based on the fusion of the words technology and literati (intellectuals).  Technorati allows users to search for blogs, photos, and other media.  Technorati redesigned their platform in 2007 to gain the attention of bloggers, Internet startups, entrepreneurs, and mainstream media.

In the first three rounds of investment, Technorati brought in $21.6 million.  Today the company announced that they have raised $7.5 million out of a targeted $10 million Series D round.  Montgomery & Co. is working on brokering an acquisition of the blog search engine company.

Previous investors in Technorati include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, August Capital, and Mobius Venture Capital.  In this round, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation participated.

Upon visiting the Technorati homepage I noticed that at the top it says, “what’s percolating in blogs now.”  The frontpage consists of stories in the media that many blogs are commenting on and linking to.  This approach is very similar to Techmeme and Digg.

Technorati has a feature called Authority and Ranks individual blogs.  The more a blog gets linked to, the more authority and ranking it receives. The top 100 blogs on Technorati are available at: http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/.

Technorati will be making an official announcement next week about the funding and will be announcing a business strategy initiative.  Look for additional Technorati news next week.

Information Sources:
[1] paidContent: More Cash For Technorati: Blog Searcher Gets $7.5 Million Of $10 Million Fourth Round by Joseph Weisenthal
[2] TechCrunch: Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming by Michael Arrington

Over the weekend, I wrote an article about The Rise and Decline of Technorati based on the assumptions that there is major management shuffle.  Then Technorati Topics was introduced yesterday.  At first I was going to write an article ruling out the idea like Sean Aune of Mashable did, but then I did a little bit more thinking about the concept and how I would improve the service if I was running the idea.

The concept seems to be similar to Digg Spy’s idea where stories getting dugg, commented on, buried, or submitted are popped at the top of the list in real-time.  Technorati Topics displays blogs that are linked to recently popping at the top in real-time.  And Technorati tracks millions of blogs.

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The CEO of Technorati, David Sifry is leaving. When a Web 2.0 company with millions in funding that has potential doesn’t make any moves for a long time and makes a few bad decisions, one cannot help but think, “if only I was the CEO of that company.”  The last time I heard from Technorati, they had raised a solid $11.5 million in funding from various sources include DFJ, yet the only feature that has come out since the funding that I know of is Technorati: Support. YAAAWN!

Eight staff members are also being let go. “At some point this year, the site turned into an aggregator of best videos, music, books and movies. It looked overwhelming, with nothing but pictures and tags on the front page. Another strange thing that happened was the release of WTF (Where is The Fire?). This feature is basically a Digg clone, letting users vote on stories. Why this was needed on top of automated popularity ranking is a mystery,” wrote Alex Iskold of Read/WriteWeb.  I agree with Iskold on this one.  Technorati had the potential to take on Google’s Blog Search unit, but decided to go with a broader market rather than a niche search through its music/video crawlers and WTF product.  Personally, I would have loved to see Technorati focus on a specific niche: Blog searching excluding music and videos.

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There’s been a paradigm shift in Technorati’s offerings.  I realized this after reading an article on Red Herring.  Technorati’s core competencies were in blog search, but now the company is offering search for various types of media such as photos, videos, and music.

Technorati recently cashed in on a $11.52 million third round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture.  By diluting itself into other areas of search, there is a concern about whether the company becomes less attractive for an acquisition from a big media company.

According to the Red Herring report, “twenty percent of Technorati visitors in April went on to visit photo-sharing site Flickr after finding links on Technorati, according to Hitwise.”  Other places that visitors landed in by using Technorati’s search include YouTube, MySpace, and Last.FM.

Earlier this month, Technorati introduced Authority which displays how many blogs have linked to a particular blog within 6 months.  The more incoming links, the more authority that particular blog has and they can show this off with the Technorati Authority Widget.

“There’s no question that Technorati is at the center of a lot of interesting phenomenon happening on the web right now, but it’s hard to understand how it works as a stand alone business,” stated Barry Parr, a Research Analyst at Jupiter.

Blog search engine, Technorati is expected to have closed its Series funding today at an amount of $11.52 million. The Series C amount had three rounds itself. The first round of Series C was at $7.6 million and then a second round pushed the funding amount to $10.52 million. DG Incubation, the head of Technorati Japan invested the last million dollars into Technorati.

The previous investors of Technorati are Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. Technorati acquired PersonalBee last month. Technorati also recently announced a service called WTF (Where’s the Fire?). This service explains why things are a buzz.

Dollar Amount Involved: $9 Million
From the land that brought you Boeing,
Microsoft and Starbuck’s comes good news for Seattle-based custom imagery website, OnRequest Images. 

The funding came from Menlo Ventures and previous investors, Frazier Technology Ventures and Maveron LLC.  The amount of third round funding is $9 million. 

“Menlo Ventures is proud to lead this round of funding for OnRequest Images”, mentioned Menlo Ventures founder and Managing Dir., H. DuBost Montgomery. ”Having spent 30 years working with companies in the technology and communications industries, I understand the tremendous workflow and productivity improvements OnRequest Images is delivering to corporations. Leveraging its proprietary OnProâ„¢ production technology, which streamlines the complex process of creating, sharing, and managing custom imagery, brand marketers can now have custom brand-aligned image libraries to complete their brand marketing strategies.”

OnRequest Images serves high-end clients in the Fortune 100 and employs 1,600 photographers.  On the OnRequest website, there is a case study of the brand imagery created for T-Mobile.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Forbes Media, a publication company that is known for publishing lists of the world’s richest powerful men and women, has acquired a Canadian company that owns finance resource website, Investopedia.com.  Investopedia gets over 1.5 million visits and has over 15 million page impressions per month.Investopedia is a guide for Stock Quotes and financial exam certifications such as Series 6, Series 7, Series 63, etc.  Investopedia also has a financial dictionary commonly used by finance professionals.The amount paid for this company was not disclosed.  Investopedia was started in June 1999 by Cory Janssen and Cory Wagner.  There are over 5000 dictionary entries, 1500 financial articles, and 750 tutorials.  Investopedia Inc. is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Yesterday Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati blogged that the company has made their first major acquisition yesterday.  The company that was acquired is Berkeley, Calif. based company, Personal Bee. Personal Bee allows users to create personalized homepages similar to services provided by NewsVine.

Personal Bee previously raised $500K from Mohr, Davidow Ventures (MDV).  Sam Jadallah provided this funding for Personal Bee and believes that the company has found a great partner.  Sam said “Normally we don’t expect such quick exits for our investments, but the fit for Personal Bee and Technorati made enough sense that we agreed.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: Upcoming Acquisition Rumored at $100 Mill+
Rivals.com is powered by 300 writers and reporters and has more than 85 employees in Tennessee.  Rivals.com has been around since 2001.  Rivals.com had 3.5 billion page views in 2006 and has 2.5 million readers.  Rivals.com is a leading website for basketball and football coverage.The company has raised $75 mill in previous funding.  Jim Heckman was a previous manager at Rivals.com, but then later founded Scout Media.  Scout Media is now owned by Fox Interactive Media.

Rivals.com syndicates content from Yahoo!, AOL, Sports Illustrate.com, MSNBC, USA Today and Sirius.

Yahoo! is rumored to be eyeing the company and quite possibly may wrap up the deal soon.

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