Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. By June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. The name Technorati is a blend of the words technology and literati, which invokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism.
Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry and its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, USA. Tantek Çelik was the site's Chief Technologist.
Technorati uses and contributes to open source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Sifry is a major open-source advocate, and was a founder of LinuxCare and later of Wi-Fi access point software developer Sputnik. Technorati includes a public developers' wiki, where developers and contributors collaborate, also various open APIs.
The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show. It was also nominated for a 2006 Webby Award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps. In 2010, Technorati was recognized as one of the “2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies” by Lead411.
Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites. These tags help categorize search results, with recent results coming first.
Technorati rates each blog's "authority", the number of unique blogs linking to the blog over the previous six months.
In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which then claimed to track 27.7 million blogs, did not take into account MySpace blogs, of which she said that there were 56 million. As a result, she said that the utility of Technorati as a gauge of blog popularity was questionable. However, by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace blogs.
In May 2006, Technorati teamed up with the PR agency Edelman. The deal earned a lot of criticism, both on principle and as a result of Edelman's 2006 fake blog scandals. Edelman and Technorati officially ended the deal in December 2006. That month, Oliver Reichenstein pointed out that the so-called "State of the Blogosphere" was more of a PR-tool and money maker for Edelman and Technorati than a reliable source, explaining in particular: a) why Technorati/Edelman's claim that "31% of the blogs are written in Japanese" was "bogus", and b) where the financial profit for the involved parties was in this.
In May 2007, Andrew Orlowski, writing for the tech tabloid The Register, criticized Technorati's May 2007 redesign. He suggested that Technorati had decided to focus more on returning image thumbnails rather than blog results. He also claimed that Technorati never quite worked correctly in the past and that the alleged refocus was "a tacit admission that it's given up on its original mission".
In August 2008, Technorati acquired the online magazine, Blogcritics, for an undisclosed sum of money. As a result, Blogcritic's founders - publisher Eric Olsen and technical director Phillip Winn - became full-time Technorati employees. One of the first collaborative ventures of the two entities was for Blogcritics writers to begin writing descriptions of Technorati tags.
In April 2009, Blogcritics underwent a complete site redesign and switched content management systems.
In 2009, Technorati decided to stop indexing blogs and sites in languages other than English in order to focus only on the English-language blogosphere. As a result, thousands of sites in various languages are no longer rated by the Technorati service.
Since its relaunch in 2009, there have been a range of complaints from Technorati users about issues such as the basic blog search not working for many months or problems with the blog claiming process. It appears that as late as November 2010 several of these issues have not been addressed. Technorati also appears to have stopped responding to these issues.