Technorati, the death of a thousand cuts

Sometimes issues of scalability make for fun outcomes in real life - such as the mismatch of bridal gowns on discount to the number of rabid brides-to-be looking for dresses that constitutes the annual Bridal Event at Filene's Basement in Boston.

But not in the case of blog searching. Kottke has written about something that's bugged me for a long time now: Technorati is getting worse and worse at its primary function of tracking down what bloggers are saying. Dave Sifry, creator of Technorati, had already noted the site's issues with scalability last month, which I thought was a good sign, but a month later the site is still really slow - that annoying "we're sorry, we can't complete your search, please add it to your watchlist" message pops up way too often for my liking.

I'm more bugged out by the speed issue than the fact that Technorati misses links, but your mileage may vary. Indeed, from a user-interface perspective there are some minor annoyances about Technorati, but really - fix the speed!

Speaking of tracking popularity: Tomorrow.sg makes it to #376 on the Feedster 500 of top blogs. Still not on the Blogrolling 500 list though.

Edit: big up to Dave Sifty for actually dropping by and noting that fixing Cosmos (i.e. URL search) is Technorati's current priority.