Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

Technorati, the blog search engine, is searching for a new CEO… I guess it would be snide to suggest that their search will take forever, miss the obvious candidates and eventually time out with no results? Oh well.

Nice. (via Neil McIntosh through Valleywag)

Is anyone else completely unimpressed with Technorati’s latest offering, “Favorites?” Yes, I know Scoble’s all jazzed about it, but to me, its a worthless feature. Why do I need another place where I can put my bookmarks? I have my iBook, my iMac, del.icio.us, this site, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch more. I don’t want another place to stash favorites and then forget about them. Some people might have moved their “primary” bookmark location over to Technorati if they are already on the site a lot, but I have serious doubts that anyone will do that with the odd, hopefully temporary, rule that you can only hold a max of 50 bookmarks or “favorites.”

I think I see what Technorati is going for…they want a search where entries come up and they are marked by a snazy little picture denoting that “this article is marked as a favorite by 23 people.” Isn’t an idea like that better served by partnering with a more established bookmarking site (del.icio.us), than just slaping together your own bastardized version? Maybe Technorati tried to partner first, only to be shot down. If that is the case, then they should have just scrapped the idea. As far as I’m concerned, they should be scrapping all feature ideas until I can search for links to Hell Yeah Bitch! .com on their site without getting the “We are experiencing a high traffic load.” message 75% of the time.

Update: I was doing a search on Technorati to pull a link for this article, and I found out that they have somehow managed to “lose” Hell Yeah Bitch! .com. I have one blog registered under my name and all its information is all blank. Features (especially ones we don’t need) should really come after all the basic site functions are 100% functional don’t you think? Maybe Dave Sifry wouldn’t mind stopping by to explain this…

So Technorati has gone the way of Google and decided to release beta projects to the world at large. While I’m not a huge fan of this move, it does seem to be en vogue as of late and thats fine. The real issue I have with this step by Technorati isn’t the entire program in of itself (which they’ve oldly named “The Kitchen”), but with the Kitchen’s first course specifically.

“Explore” is what they are calling it and they are billing it with this short description:

Find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting. Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject.

Now correct me if I’m wrong…but doesn’t that statement sound like what Technorati was supposed to be? Way before the stove was hot in “The Kitchen” or even before when “The Kitchen” was created, Technorati was billed as the site where one could go to see what was being discussed on the Web at any given moment. It was supposed to be a tracker in the on-going converstation of the (I shudder as I type this) blogosphere. I thought this was still the point of the site on the whole up until an hour or so ago when I found “The Kitchen”. Right? I couldn’t have been that misinformed right? Telling the world of the talk on the web currently was the point of even making Technorati to begin with right?

So what the hell happened? Somewhere along the lines Technorati decieded to take the purpose of their site and make it into a feature…or better yet…a beta feature! Its amounts to Google releasing a new beta program of Google Web Search tomorrow. Improving your site is one thing, but this is a whole new and strange level. Say Explore takes off, what is to become of Technorati? I really just don’t understand any of the reasoning behind this. Its sound like an upgrade but they are treating it like an added feature.

I’ll give them one thing though, it takes balls to take a failed goal and turn around and market it to your users as a brand new idea.

Remember back when I announced that we were going with Technorati as our source for finding link backs? Well thats over.

Hell Yeah Bitch! .com is following in the steps of Kottke and the Weblogs Inc group with ditching Technorati. I, however, will not be nearly as mean as the aforementioned were:
From Kottke:

Pretty much everyone I talk to in the industry thinks the site sucks and we’ve just been waiting for it to get better because, well, it would have to at some point, wouldn’t it? Well, I’m tired of waiting. Goodbye, Technorati…your url will darken the door of my browser no longer.

I know the guys over at Technorati are trying their best, but right now IceRocket is kicking your ass. Its nothing personal. Dave Sifry , the “man” at Technorati, was nice enough to post here when I made my initial announcement welcoming Technorati. Dave, its nothing personal, but we are going with IceRocket for the time being. I know you guys are working on speed issues and quality results, but untill I see some actual and major increased in speed and quality of results we are sticking with IceRocket…I would imagine that, besides our kick-ass name, we aren’t much different from many of the other sites out there.

Remember “It’s not you, its me!” (Actually its you) and if you get it going again, your only a rebuild away from being BFFs with Hell Yeah Bitch! .com again.

You might have noticed yet another thing I have added to the bottom of every post. There is now a listing of different “tags” that pretain to that article. Tags are simply keywords that the author decided pretained to that post. Clicking on any of them will send you to the search script here at Hell Yeah Bitch and show you other articles that mention or pretain to that tag. I have slightly updated the search script (much bigger updates comming soon) to search for the tags as well as the body, title, and category, so if you want more articles on “tags” just put that in the search and everything that has anything to do with it will pop up.

The other aspect of adding tags to every post here in the future is that we have no gotten into bed even more with Technorati as they will scan our posts and if you search of a certain tag at Technorati, the posts here will come up in those results.

I made the decision to work with a little, but mainly leave the current set of categories largly unchanged. The tags are just extra categorization within each “main” category.

Let me know if you like it and if you have any suggestions on how to make it better. (Now I just have to remember to start “tagging” all of my posts!)