Secrets of the A-list bloggers: Technorati vs. Google

Look­ing at data about the A-list, first in and of its own, and later as part of a wider scope made me won­der about the ini­tial data set I was using. What does it mean to be on the Tech­no­rati 100? Is Tech­no­rati pre­sent­ing an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the world? And how does it com­pare against the wider world? So I decided to start gath­er­ing data from other search engines. In this entry, I will go into a more detailed analy­sis of that infor­ma­tion and will attempt to answer some of the ques­tions I raised above.

Source Check

In my ini­tial review, I noticed that Tech­no­rati was rank­ing sites bases on sources. How­ever, incom­ing and out­go­ing infor­ma­tion is not really avail­able from the major search engines when it comes to sourc­ing data. So, for this par­tic­u­lar inves­ti­ga­tion, I decided to dis­miss source data and focus on link data. I decided to go and get link data from the three largest search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN (that last one was included at the last minute just because I knew that Robert Scoble would com­plain about the study being biased if I didn’t include MSN).

Pick­ing three search engines was also inter­est­ing because it pro­vid­ing some sort of ref­er­ence check. If one of the engines did not line up with the other two, we could point out to a poten­tial flaw in that engine instead of try­ing to under­stand why the data was wrong.

Hav­ing picked that data set, I decided to start gath­er­ing the data. Let me say that it’s a lot of infor­ma­tion and, should I try to do this again in the future, writ­ing soft­ware to gather the infor­ma­tion will prob­a­bly be less time con­sum­ing that try­ing to get it by hand.

But enough about the process, let’s get into the numbers.

Tech­no­rati vs. Google

So the first dataset I cre­ated was a com­par­a­tive index of Tech­no­rati and Google. The set was cre­ated by grab­bing the num­ber of links to a site in Google and get­ting the equiv­a­lent value for Tech­no­rati. The resut looked like this:

The third col­umn in this is just a quick set of cal­cu­la­tion pro­vid­ing us with some data as to what per­cent­age of Google links was avail­able in Tech­no­rati. From there, we’re already notic­ing some inter­est­ing trends. While most of the data ends up show­ing Google has hav­ing a larger set of links in its index than Tech­no­rati, there are 16 cases where the Tech­no­rati index of links is larger than the Google one. In any study, over 15% of a dataset is sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant. How Tech­no­rati ends up get­ting more data than Google is some­thing that some­one might want to inves­ti­gate. Beyond that, it appears that Tech­no­rati gets about 30% of the links that Google get to a par­tic­u­lar site, as illus­trated in the chart below:

The next set of inter­est­ing find­ings is that while the link­age from Tech­no­rati is gen­er­ally lower than it is in Google, it is con­sis­tently that way. A quick analy­sis of the data set shows that the aver­age per­cent­age of Tech­no­rati links com­pared to Google links is not that far from the aver­age median of Tech­no­rati links com­pared to Google links. Con­fused by that last sen­tence? Don’t worry (I was too after I wrote it) and let me show you, by pulling out another data chart:

Doesn’t it all become clearer? On aver­age, for the top 100 blog­gers, Tech­no­rati holds 27.56% of the links that Google holds. Part of the rea­son behind this may be that Tech­no­rati only rep­re­sents the blogs sub­set of the whole web while Google rep­re­sents link­age for the web as a whole. From here, we could gather that for every link a blog pro­vides, other sources on the web pro­vide 3 links. Since blogs still rep­re­sent a small por­tion of the web, how­ever, the impor­tance of links in the blog world may be out­pac­ing the impor­tance of links in the non-blog world. Part of the rea­son behind this could be that links are one of the big cur­rency in the web space and many blogs are offer­ing lit­tle con­tent but are heavy on the link­ing. If an aver­age blog entry is under 300 words, it often con­tains at least one link. This could mean that Tech­no­rati and other blog search engines are right to con­sider links as a strong mea­sure­ment, but may show that blogs, as a medium, are not pro­vid­ing that much con­tent beyond linking.

How­ever, it gets even more inter­est­ing if you dig in. Look­ing at the data, these val­ues are actu­ally mis­lead­ing. What is hap­pen­ing is not truly an egal­i­tar­ian match. Doing a quick review of the dis­tri­b­u­tion, we start see­ing some inter­est­ing trends.

Let’s graph the Tech­no­rati links as per­cent­age of Google to see a lit­tle more of what I’m inferring:

Look­ing at this, it seems that our friends at Tech­no­rati have a bias. On aver­age, blogs in the top 10 are 8% more likely to get indexed by both Google and Tech­no­rati than they are to be indexed by Google only. Con­sid­er­ing that Google already admits to some level of bias in their sys­tem (part of the foun­da­tion for PageR­ank is that sites with higher PageR­anks get indexed more often), it is a bit wor­ri­some, espe­cially if the trend holds across the whole of Technorati’s uni­verse. If Google favors index­ing more pop­u­lar sites more often, a clear opprtu­nity for world-live-web search engines like Tech­no­rati would be in the long tail of less-often-indexed sites but Tech­no­rati seems to ignore that oppor­tu­nity and con­cen­trate on the top sites. What that will trans­late into is a direct repro­duc­tion of the power laws when it comes to index­ing of blogs.

But is that true of Google vs Tech­no­rati only? Or do the same rules apply for other search engines? We’ll look at that in the next entry.