After my initial review last night I have spent some more time playing around with Technorati's new Blog Finder service. I have also read other reviews by Neville, Tris, Michael and BL Ochman on the new service.

To be fair David Sifry did comment on my original post that they're working on some of the issues I noted.

1. It's Easy to Game the System

According to the initial blog post by Derek Powazek:

By default, the blogs are presented in order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first. So each of these Blog Finder pages is like a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine. You can also sort each tag by how recently the blogs have updated, or alphabetical by title.

What this means is that if you have a high link count you can configure your blog to use any tag and end up high on the list regardless of whether it is a subject you blog about. This defeats the entire purpose of ranking by authority.

Robert Scoble did this yesterday:

I found you have to tag your blog to really get included here properly. For instance, I just added Apple to my tag list. And I'm now the #1 Apple blog (don't worry, I'm removing that tag, don't wanna be listed as a spammer, but shows that the system can be gamed quite easily).

I played around as well. I added a few new tags to my blog and soon appeared as the Most Authorative blog even though I never wrote on the subject. I just had a higher link-count than the other blogs listed.

Is it fair the somebody like Jeremy Pepper who tags all his individual posts with pr or public relations (using Blogger which does not support tags, i.e. he has to hand-code all the tags) over the past few months can be outranked by a popular blogger that happens to tag a single post pr?

2. The 'Configure Your Blog' Option is Buggy

Update 09.12.05: According to the Technorati blog this item has been fixed. I tested it again, and it is working for me :-)

I talked about this yesterday, but here are some more details.

If you have claimed your blog via Technorati you can go in and modify the tags you want to use to describe your blog. By default it pulls in tags that you have already used. (See Michael's posts on this) I made an update to this list then saved the option. When I returned the tags were different.

Shown below is a recent update I made to my tags via the Technorati interface.

After I saved and then returned to the page here are the tags shown:

As you can see the tag pr is repeated often and many of the new tags I inserted are gone. At first I thought it was becuase I had not used some of the tags in my blog so Technorati was rejecting them (which would be good, see #1 above), but the tag Florida is still listed. I have never used the tag Florida in my blog though.

I think over time Technorati will clean up these issues but it seems they are adding more fuel to the fire that their searches are not reliable or relevant in many cases. I am really interested in seeing how they will handle the ranking of blogs by authority. As it stands now, it will be very easy for popular blogs to dominate categories.