During a recent presentation a few weeks ago I noticed a pretty big drop in the number of results Technorati was returning. A search that normally returned 15,000+ results, now only showed less than 2,000. The irony of course is that conducting a search right now, shows 0 results, a common occurrence on Technorati.

Heading over to Google Blog search, the same query returns almost 15,000 results. I talked about these anomalies with Peter Himler at PRSA and he blogged about it. Technorati soon responded, and now TechCrunch has posted a similar thread. The official Technorati response, one to Peter:

Hit counts are often dubious metrics. Index rebuilds, spam purges and other search engine management functions will always cause fluctuations. As part of Technorati's cost and performance management efforts, we've been running the service with the data sets of historic data scaled back. We may bring that data back online in the future but the days of monotonically ascending hit counts are currently suspended.

and a similar comment on TechCrunch:

We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.

On TC, some of the comments have said, 'who looks beyond 36 hours,' or why do we even need the old data?

Here's the issue, the client. When you're dealing with a newbie client that is just learning the world of social media and you show them the search services and one shows a few thousand results and the other ten thousand or more the question will always come up, "Why is Google finding more?" or something similar. Now we can talk till we're blue in the face about relevance and community context, etc, but so many times it's just about raw numbers to a client.

With that, they prefer to use Google and Technorati moves even closer to.....(insert witty comment here).