May 27, 2006

Technorati continues to suck

Just go and search for these three widely used words in Persian,
Arabic and Hebrew. You'll get ZERO results:
امروز
عراق
הארץ

How can Mr. Sifry's Technorati be "the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs," when they can't even show a single result for queries in at least these three languages whose blogospheres could easily be as big as one million blogs in total?

Posted by hoder at May 27, 2006 4:59 AM| TrackBack

Comments
It is actually not about missing content - it is about the morphological analysis required to (a) parse the blog text and turn it into words, and (b) parse search queries well enough to determine words. Otherwise, it all looks like one big string of characters. Dave
- By: David Sifry on June 2, 2006
---------
re: David Sifry's response, isn't parsing unicode text generally the same across the board? A search for ایران or something would be handled the same (from a programming aspect) as "Iran", no?
- By: Vilas Pendse on May 31, 2006
---------
امروز: "today" in Farsi عراق: "Iraq" in Farsi and Arabic
- By: amir on May 31, 2006
---------
it says Today Iraq Haaretz
- By: Navid on May 29, 2006
---------
Actually, it is because our parsing of farsi, arabic, and hebrew aren't very good right now. We're actually working on building out our search support for more languages, and these 3 are important. But it'll still be a while until things are much improved. Sorry... Dave
- By: David Sifry on May 28, 2006
---------
Because Technorati comes from a country known to impose is monoculture on everyone, including the supposition that nothing of importance happens in languages other than English? Granted, Technorati recently added support for a handful of foreign languages, but then again only Western ones. I guess that Michael and his cohort REALLY meant it, when they sang "WE are the world"...
- By: Martin-Éric on May 27, 2006
---------
Could you translate? I think I see "Iran" and "Haaretz," but its been a long time since I studied either Arabic or Hebrew, and I've never had a chance to learn any Persian.
- By: Adam S on May 27, 2006
---------
Just for kicks, I decided to search Blogger.com for each of these words: 308,679: امروز عراق :36,972 הארץ :2,774 Pretty stunning how much content is getting missed.
- By: andy carvin on May 27, 2006
---------
Post a comment
bold (ctrl-shft-B)italics (ctrl-shft-T)link (ctrl-shft-A)
Name*:   
Email*:
URL:


Note:
* Required
The following HTML tags are allowed in your comments: <a> <b> <i>. To make line and paragraph breaks, press return (don't use <br> or <p>).
The bold, italics, and link buttons (and associated shortcut keys) only work in IE 5+ on the PC.