It is 4am in the morning. Nobody is using the Internet. What happens when I do a search on popular blog search engine Technorati?
The above error message admit that something is wrong. Occasionally when trying to search, Technorati will claim that there are zero results, even on common words like "Bush," "blogging," and "Apple."
There are two reasons that Technorati's technical issues annoy me. The first is that I feel compelled to use it. While I have tried several other search engines that claim to index blogs, I have found that Technorati has the best results. For all practical intents and purposes, Technorati is the Google of blog search engines, beating even Google's own Blog Search.
The second (and far more important) reason is that I get the impression that nobody at Technorati actually cares. When you submit a support request at Technorati's website, it sends you a form response in reply:
Dear Technorati User,
Thank you for taking the time to drop us a line. If you are reporting a problem you may be having you will be contacted by a support technician once we have had a chance to review your message.
If you don't hear back from anyone within a few business days then please let us know and be sure to include the subject and ticket number, "[Feedback] Error report #34163], " in your note so we may properly track your issue and its progress.
Since October 2004, I have contacted Technorati for technical support eight times.[1] They have gotten back to me twice. Once was in December 2004. The other time was in October 2005, in response to a request that I had sent in early September. This latter response made me feel like Technorati cared, since it was fielded by the CEO himself, Dave Sifry. He apologized for the long time it took to get back to me, noting it was because they were "understaffed in support."
Then they hired more customer service people. From my point of view, however, nothing has changed. Despite the claims of Technorati's auto-reply that a technician will get in touch, my experience has been that this does not happen. If there was no expectation of personalized service, then the lack of response would not be an issue. As it stands now, Technorati's customer service is simply unprofessional.
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[1] This number does not include suggestions for new Technorati features.
Marty, I am sorry you are having difficulties with Technorati, both the service and our customer support. We are, in fact, experiencing a high load on our service at the moment and our operations team and key engineers are working to solve the problem as quickly as possible. I believe we have found the culprit and have addressed the issue. The system is working out the backlog, but things should be back to normal shortly.
Regarding your very valid issue with customer support responsiveness, again, I apologize. Like many others, you find Technorati to be useful and, from time to time, send us feedback and support requests. We are still backlogged in support and are pursuing several paths in order to streamline our processing and make certain that we get back to each and every respondent.
I thank you for sticking with us and hope that we will soon deliver on your expectations. Dorion
I see you actually got a response which is great. My blog WAS listed on Technorati and in the top 5,000 give or take. I have contacted them several times with my issues with my blog not being picked up as having updated.
I deleted my blog claim thinking I would claim it again in an hour or so, NOW I get a message telling me my blog is unclaimable
sigh.
So now I have an account but my blog doesn't exist apparently LOL
4am in the morning, so no-one is using technorati.
wow.
Firstly, that's redundant. 4am in the evening? nope. Just "4am" is sufficient.
Secondly.. do you really want me to launch into a rant about what a tiny fraction of the global population live in your timezone? Really? I'm sure you know better…
I assume that the majority (or at least a significant proportion) of Technorati users live in the United States. My complaint was not really about the fact that Technorati was down, but the fact that their technical support structure makes it difficult to communicate with them.