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Technorati adds $7.5M more with Series D

Staying on the theme of blog search engines (see: Twingly),  today Technorati announced closing $7.5 million of a $10 million Series D round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) with Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation (operator of Technorati Japan) in as well. That brings total funding for the San Francisco-based company to just over $30 million since its founding in 2002.

From the looks of it, things seem to been stalling with the long-running authority on the blogosphere. Unique visitors to the site seem to be trending downward over the past year, one in which both the number of bloggers and blog readers has grown significantly. (see: Sifry's State of the Blogosphere report.) Not a good sign.

Interesting to note that there are no new investors in this round, another possible point of wary. VentureBeat reports that according to the regulatory filing, several of members of the senior management team and board, led by Founder/CEO David L. Sifry, including Richard Jalichandra, Sanford Robertson, Joi Ito, Peter Hirshberg, Ryan McIntyre and Andreas Stavropoulos have all invested personally in the Series D. Interesting indeed. Sure can be tough to compete with Google once it decided to get into the Blogsearch game.

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Technorati

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Spam-free blog searching for everyone - Twingly goes live!

Sweden-based blog search engine Twingly goes live today for the general public after a 3000-strong beta user base pounded on the servers for a few months. They even had us all load test it a few weeks ago asking us to take it down in the international Twingly Server Meltdown Hour, which apparently went off with little performance slowing at all. The blog search service aims to filter out the spam blogs, delivering just the content you're looking for and nothing more.

There's also their nifty way of getting more traffic for your blog by using their link sharing tool called Blogstream. Twingly's Blogstream has become "a huge hit in Europe" with reportedly 45 Twingly Partners (mostly Swedish) using the Blogstream Widget, including the country's two largest print publications, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet.

The social search features of the site are intriguing, with Digg-like buttons on each search result allowing users to "link/like" the most relevant results. This is something I still don't understand why Google Blog Search hasn't yet adopted. Technorati of course has a weighting of relevancy using its authority score for each blog result, which is derived from how many links the blog has received on the web. Twingly's social angle could prove more useful once a real user base develops over there. As of now, most results have at most one or two "likes" which doesn't really help at this point.

They are also featuring a "What's Hot Now" stream of popular keywords, though I think they're not even close to how effective Technorati is in that regard. In the end, Twingly's worth a look, and could end up a strong #3 or 4 player in the blog search game behind Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Sphere.

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Twingly

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Viewzi goes live today

10,000 private beta users later and Viewzi is ready to tear down the walls and launch to the public today. We recently covered the visual search engine back in April and had some fun, Tom-Cruise-style, flipping, spinning and dragging around search results like solving an intricate picture puzzle.

Thanks to Viewzi's Giovanni Gallucci for keeping me updated on their progress. Techcrunch, amidst a sea of Apple's WWDC (iPhone) coverage today, found time to run the story before the Jobs live-blogging began. For more mirco updates, follow Viewzi on Twitter.

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Viewzi

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Does Tom Cruise use Viewzi?

Remember the movie Minority Report? An eery feeling came over me when I poked around in the beta of Viewzi search. Suddenly search has a whole new graphical interface that makes Google (yes, i know) look old guard. It organizes search into a series of pre-set "views," each formatted to best serve that type of search. There's a Photo view, a Multisource view (Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.), an MP3 search view, a Shopping view, even a TechCrunch view. (Arrington will be proud.) You can easily drag photos and site thumbnails, which then expand seamlessly as previews. Very fresh and smooth. Someone even dubbed Viewzi "the iPhone of search."

Their "Viewzi 101" video is a nifty walkthrough of how it works - and is suspiciously familiar to the Twitter video I posted a little while back. The printed out pages of Google search is a clever touch and perhaps a subtle dig.

My first search on Viewzi was "Hollywood," which incidentally brought up Hollywood, Alabama under the weather view and then a series of young-Hollywood club shots in the photos view and series of songs with "Hollywood" in the title under the MP3 view.

Next search was Robert Scoble, since he hooked up the invite. I had a feeling of being at CTU on "24" and pulling up someone's whole identity in a matter of seconds. Quite a lot out there about him, and plenty of photos.

Definitely fun to play with, especially for photos and visual media. I'm just not sure it can replace Google as my goto search in terms of fast and reliable hits. Just not fast enough yet, but hey, it's still in beta.