Molly has an interesting blog post about her experience spending time over at Technorati. Adam Hertz, the Vice President of Engineering told her about a well-known issue at Technorati — slow server performance.

Adam drew an upward facing triangle on a whiteboard and told me it’s known as the Devil’s Triangle around the office. The bottom left angle is marked as query rate, the top is marked data set and the bottom right angle is update rate.

While data set and query rate are involved in other types of search engines, the update rate is a feature that is challenging Technorati. Unlike a traditional search engine, which doesn’t look at update frequency, Technorati is constantly logging updates to blogs as well as managing data sets and queries, and this is the area where the most problem solving needs to be done.

Technorati has been transparent about the problem and their efforts to address the issue, which is an awesome thing other company can learn from.

The post also describes the significance of tagging as a social tool and a new way to categorize blog post, especially on occasions when search engine isn’t able to distinguish what the post is really about.

Source: Tag You’re It: Talking to Technorati.