Mike Arrington at TechCrunch seems fairly optimistic about Technorati’s latest attempts to refocus the site, and perhaps it would be fair to give the new CEO a little time before we assess his chances of failure, but I must admit that I’m underwhelmed so far. It’s great to say that the site wants to get back to focusing on bloggers, but slapping up a home page that tracks blog posts and creating a “Blogger Central” page doesn’t really do it for me (although Winextra seems to like it).

As for the “Percolator,” I don’t see how it’s really any different from Technorati WTF or Technorati Explore, or any of the other attempts the site made in the past to become the aggregator of choice. Mike says in his post that he goes to Technorati several times a day, and sees himself using it a lot more if these changes catch hold. I’m not sure what Mike is doing there two or three times a day, but I know that I hardly ever go there, and I haven’t noticed my life or blogging suffering as a result.

As far as I can tell, Percolator is no better than Techmeme.com — and in fact not even in the same league really — or Propeller, or even Blogrunner for that matter (now owned by the New York Times). I think Technorati is going to have to do a little better than that to show everyone it’s back on track. And MG Siegler at ParisLemon is right, they could start by trying harder to get rid of the splogs in their links.

Mike Arrington noticed the exact same thing I did when I read Wired’s interview with new Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra. When asked about Techmeme, which just came out with its Top 100 “leaderboard” feature, the new Technorati honcho said it was a “great little site,” but it was clear that he didn’t see it as much competition.

As Mike notes in his post, this comes off sounding awfully high and mighty — and from a company that has surprisingly little to be high and mighty about, when you get right down to it. Technorati has been riddled with performance issues for longer than I care to think about, has launched new features that seem poorly thought out and are already being done better by others (WTF comes to mind), and is in danger of being overshadowed by a website run by a single person, Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera.

Many people have pointed out that Techmeme.com only focuses on a small number of tech blogs, while Technorati covers the waterfront of the blogosphere — and that’s true. But Google blog search already does a far better job of that, despite only having been around a fraction as long. And when it comes to blogs, tech is still a big segment, and Techmeme pretty much owns it as far as I’m concerned (although Digg.com has a chunk as well).

To his credit, Jalichandra responded to Mike’s post in the comments at TechCrunch, and said he didn’t intend to come off as belittling Techmeme in any way. So he’s clearly a good sport. But if there’s one thing the new CEO should know by now, it’s that when you’re in a hole the first thing you should do is stop digging — and his new company is still in one heck of a hole.

As you can read in a number of different places this morning, Technorati — the ailing blog-search engine that recently lost its CEO, Dave Sifry — has come out with a new offering known as Technorati Topics, which appears to be a scrolling list of blogosphere posts chosen by the team at Technorati, based on a bunch of criteria that we aren’t really told a lot about.

The company’s description says that it chooses blogs based on a number of factors, including their Technorati “authority” — another ranking system that we know very little about, and which consequently carries little or no weight (I for one can’t even figure out the numbering system). So far, the new feature is getting panned by many. Topics, incidentally, is not to be confused with the last new service that Technorati launched: that was Technorati WTF, a Digg-style ranking feature that appears to be a ghost town.

As Duncan Riley notes at TechCrunch, it would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and to poke fun at how they are shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic — so easy that I plan to do it. What the heck is this company thinking? They have no CEO, their database comes under fire repeatedly for its lack of reliability, and this is the best they can do?

When I first heard about it, I thought Technorati Topics might be going after Techmeme.com, but having seen it I think Gabe Rivera can sleep easily — Topics is just a scrolling list of posts with no organization or ranking that I can see, whereas Techmeme (for all its inscrutability) pulls threads together for you and makes it easy to see a story evolve over time.

Dave Sifry says that this is just the first in a series of releases and announcements, and for Technorati’s sake I hope they improve.

It has looked for awhile as though Technorati was having difficulties — and not just technical difficulties but in the executive suite as well, with founder and CEO Dave Sifry writing on his blog earlier this year that the blog-search company was looking for someone to replace him — but now the wheels really appear to have come off. Sifry is leaving the company completely, without a CEO to fill his shoes, and eight people are being laid off.

In his farewall post, Sifry says the company will be run in the interim by a committee of the board (trust me when I say this is rarely a good sign), and that the search for a CEO continues. The Technorati founder says he will continue to be “engaged strategically from the point of view of a director on the board.” According to his post, he will be chairman. As for the layoffs, Sifry says:

“Because we’ll be focusing our efforts more precisely moving forward, it became clear we needed to adjust our expense structure to be more appropriately aligned with our priorities moving forward. So, we had to make the difficult decision to part ways with eight of our staff members.”

I’ll say this much for Dave — he certainly seems to have gotten the hang of the cold-blooded CEO dismissal message. Om notes that one of Technorati’s biggest issues (apart from uptime problems) is that Google is eating the company’s lunch. Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher has some added perspective on the difficulties of the startup game here.

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry has a new “state of the blogosphere” report out, although the first part of it reads more like a “state of Technorati” report — which my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans and some others believe is a bit of plumage-fluffing aimed at catching the eye of a potential suitor such as Yahoogle or MicroNews Corp.

Be that as it may, it is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad. It’s no MySpace, but still pretty good for a blog-search engine. But Dave doesn’t just want to be a blog-search engine — he wants to be a media company. Don’t we all, Dave. But I’m not sure a lot of traffic to Technorati’s tagged media pages really counts as being a media company, unless we are really stretching the definition of the term.

It’s obvious that part of Dave’s post is also designed to cement the impression that Technorati is the leader in blog search, a campaign he has also carried into the comments section of Robert Scoble’s blog, on a post the Scobelizer did about whose search is better. I think Dave should win some kind of award for the number of comments he left on Scobey’s blog, most of which (not surprisingly) are aimed at showing the deficiencies of Google’s search — although to give him full credit, he responds to criticisms from bloggers as well.

So is Technorati the leader? The charts on Dave’s post look pretty good, although neither Hitwise nor Quantcast are infallible when it comes to measuring such things. But as Zoli Erdos points out, Technorati’s lead over Google may not be as large as it seems, and there is clearly still room for improvement — for example, Google’s blog search indexes comments as well as posts. And as I have written about previously, Sphere and Icerocket have their strengths (and weaknesses) as well.

In other words, blog search is still very much a horse race.

Update:

Allan Stern of CenterNetworks says that Technorati shouldn’t be compared to Google’s blog search at all, but to Google proper, which is a fair point. And Jim Kukral wonders in a post on his blog why Mark Cuban has let IceRocket die. Are you going to just sit there and take that, Mark? :-)