technorati’s misuse of authority

so i was over at technorati earlier today, looking for stuff about my company, kickapps. i do this pretty much every morning to see if we’ve been picked up by any of the bloggers. usually, i spend just a minute on it and then move on since there’s not usually much of interest.

but today, i spent a little longer. i always wondered what the “authority” select-box did. how does technorati measure authority? i tried it figure it out.

• i performed a search - http://technorati.com/search/kickapps
• set authority select-box to “a lot of authority”
• i saw my personal blog excluded from the results. this is funny because i actually am an authority on kickapps. i work there, i’ve been there since the early days, and i’ve written a couple relevant blog posts on the topic. so , why’d i get filtered?
• also note that i saw the kickapps corporate blog excluded from the results. the kickapps corporate blog is the authoritative blog for kickapps. it should definitely be in the results when i select “a lot of authority”.

but wait, what’s this? technorati displays the number of blogs linking to each item in the search results list. it appears that the “authority” filter is simply a (perhaps modified) link counting strategy. blogs with “lots of authority” have lots of other blogs linking to them, while blogs with “little authority” don’t have many incoming links (like my personal blog and the kickapps corporate blog).

that’s a fine strategy for determining some relevance of a blog, but it’s certainly far removed from a legitimate measure of authority of a blog. silly technorati, you are misleading your audience and undermining your own credibility.

it would be useful if technorati renamed this authority select-box to “incoming links” or “link popularity” with options ["many", "some", "few"], or something to that effect.