Allen Stern reports over at Centernetworks today that old school occasional blog search engine Technorati has taken $7.5 million Series D. Total funding to date is at approx $30 million. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation.
Others are being rather unkind to Technorati, joking that many didn’t even know the site was still going. That’s a little unfair, but having said that I’ve only started using it again recently as a way to track incoming links for The Inquisitr. Before May I hadn’t used it for years, having long since switched to Google Blog Search.
Technorati has a colorful history, being really the first blog search engine of any significance (it was there when I started blogging in late 02, early 03) then after taking a couple of rounds it desperately tried to reinvent itself over and over again in an attempt to make money. The site switched back to blog search in December 2007 .
Earlier this year Technorati announced it was going into the blog advertising game and I had a conversation with CEO Richard Jalichandra some time thereafter about the product: nice chap, but the conversation lacked substance and there was absolutely nothing I could use for a post. As far as I know Technorati’s only advertising partner is Blog Catalog, and nothing publicly has been said about the advertising network since. Perhaps the launch of the advertising network is what the new round is for?
I will make one observation though, in 2008, like 2005 , Technorati is still broken. As a now regular user the number of times I see the message “the Technorati Monster has escaped again” is beyond a joke. How can a company which at its core is a blog search engine still have not lifted their game after all these years? To me, Technorati is a bit like Twitter, I’ll always have a soft spot for it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t seriously broken. Twitter is a long shot at being fixed, Technorati search has been on life support for years. Here’s hoping the ad network takes off and that the income produced might one day be used to fix Technorati at its core.
