I’m writing a bit of an epic on Google and Skype at the moment, but as a break, here’s a small rant.
I was just doing a Technorati search, and I got:
Sorry, we couldn’t complete your search because we’re experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation.
Oh me, oh my. Game over. This is not Google-class search. (I can’t remember ever having a Google error. They’re carrier class, five-nines, etc.)
Why would I ever go back to Technorati when the competition is only a click away? Capacity planning isn’t such a dark art, you know. If you’re planning for big-time success, pay some tribute to Uncle Larry, buy yourself a nice grid server, hire my brother to install it. It scales, trust me, even if your wallet feels a bit thin afterwards.
PS - Technorati took my $5 in the early days promising a daily watchlist email. They didn’t deliver. Shame on them. Whatever they spent it on, it wasn’t a scaleable architecture.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 08:03 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Martin,
I'm sorry about that. We're working on a bunch of scalability improvements and performance fixes this month and through September. Buying a grid server and plugging it in isn't quite what we do, the loads and traffic volumes are in a different class for that type of server.
Sorry we let you down, we'll be working really hard over the next 6 weeks to make sure that that doesn't happen again.
Dave
Posted by: at August 24, 2005 03:43 AMThe error is pretty persistent, and I get it frequently. As for the "competition" check out Talk Digger http://talkdigger.com/
Pretty cool parallel searches.
Matt
Posted by: at August 24, 2005 07:18 AMIn my experience, all Technorati URL searches have always been rejected the first time for as long as I've been using it. You always have to hit it twice.
Posted by: at August 24, 2005 12:57 PMRegarding google and scale, I used to routinely get a "service unavailable" type error with google mail (not for some time now), and
still sometimes find busted links in their groups implementation (message summaries with links to articles that don't resolve).
They're not perfect:-)