Google buys Technorati

Google buys Technorati - sounds plausible doesn't it? Since it seems to be end-of-summer merger mania (ebay buys Skype for example). Tom Raftery thinks it might be Rupert Murdock eyeing Technorati, which after the recent acquisition of MySpaces.com would be yet another step towards Rupert Murdock's Fox News, IGN, and all his other properies controlling the world. Oh no! Well could be worse, it could be Bill Gates, right?

Anyway, another blogger thinks it will be a large search engine company and predicted it would happen within a week (his post was August 11th, so a bit off on the time-frame). Scoble also stated he though a buyout was in the works around the same timeframe. Mark Evans also blogged recently about Technorati getting bought out and he provides some analysis and some outside links to blogs covering a potential Technorati acquisition. I've had this blog post on a potential Technorati acquisition marked as "draft" for a few weeks and just haven't had the time to finish it.

So I thought I'd chime in with who I think an acquisition of Technorati would make a lot of sense. The obvious answer is Google. Google sees itself as the premiere web search engine in the world with the most relevant search results. Technorati aims to be the "Google of blogs" by providing the most relevant search results for blogs. Bloggers have caught onto "tagging" using rel="tag" within a hyperlink) their blog posts with keywords that are relevant to the blog entry they are posting which Technorati can then read when it slurps the blog.

Technorati then lets you search blogs based on these tags, for instance if you click here: http://technorati.com/tag/voip you will see blog posts "tagged" with "voip".

There is a problem of bloggers "spamming" Technorati by putting in irrelevant "tags", but Technorati has been aggressively pursuing the removal of spam listings in their search engine. Google no doubt has a "black list" of spammy sites, spammy IP addresses, and they are probably the largest lists on the web, so they can leverage their internal database to help sift through bloggers spamming a specialized blog search engine.

In addition, it now appears that mainstream media outlets are using Technorati search results including Newsweek online and the Washington Post, as seen by this screenshot take from the right sidebar on Newsweek online. Bloggers on a mainsteam media's website? I wonder what the "professional" journalists think about sharing eyeballs and screen real estate with so-called "pajama journalists"?


So the question arises, "When will Google offer a specialized blog search?" They could simply develop their own. It wouldn't be that hard for Google to read the rel="tag" code already in place within blogs and then use Google's search engine wizardry to figure out blogs with the most authority, the most relevant blog post, etc. OR Google could simply buy Technorati. As Technorati founder and CEO David L. Sifry has said, a new blog is created almost every second, and the total number of blogs doubles about every 5 ½ months. If Google wants to be the "end all be all" of search engines it needs to stop and take notice of blogs and offer relevant searches of the entire blogosphere. And then life would be good...