Technorati have launched a mode button on their search which allows the user to sort by authority. They are trying to solve a problem that bedevils the consumer blog search companies: how to filter out spam results. If spammers are targetting keywords - last week we saw a blog targeting the christian name “Alan” - then live searches become gradually less and less effective. One approach is to say that if a blog has links back to it, it has authority. Increase the number of links and you increase the authority. The idea depends on links having a certain value.

This was the approach taken to internet search by Altavista around 1997-98. Altavista favoured sites with lots of links over sites with fewer. It worked for a while and made Altavista the most effective internet search engine. Then the spammers discovered that links could be spammed just as effectively as keywords and the Altavista approach failed. The problem is that a link does not have a universal value. A link from a spam site has less value than a link from the New York Times.

This is the weakness of the current Technorati approach. A full analysis of the weakness of the Technorati system can be found by our partner Flemming Madsen here.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 9:06 am and is filed under Splogs, Technorati, Spam blogs, Business blogging, Blogging, Buzz tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.