Niall Kennedy, formerly with Technorati, has been assimilated into the Microsoft collective Live.com division. His new job?

… to construct a team and product from scratch focused on scalability and connecting syndication clients and their users wherever they may exist: desktop, mobile, media center, gaming console, widget, gadget, and more.

Continued bad news for Technorati as any sort of buyout/acquisition, because Yahoo is allegedly building a Technorati killer too. Dave Sifry used to comment here but I think he was run off long ago thinking perhaps that I was a naysayer on his company. If that’s the case, he’d be wrong of course, because I actually think Technorati is currently the best of the blog search crop. It’s too bad no bigger fish seem to find enough value in them to buy them out and would rather compete against, but maybe their price is just insane. I don’t pretend to know those details.

At one time Technorati was horrible for search scalability and I believe this was under Kennedy’s employ there (please somebody correct me if I’m wrong), but they have since improved on that front, also under his employ, so this could be a really smart hire if he was among those responsible for these noticeable improvements. Technorati still has other problems, mainly being a spam/splogger magnet, but they certainly aren’t alone. Will be interesting to see how Kennedy’s new live.com team deals with these problems.

Richard McManus points out the best part of Niall’s post: that live.com will be the default page in Windows Vista and IE7. This coupled with the recent ability to create and share live.com search macros just made live.com more intriguing and much less sucky than the existing MSN search. Microsoft is really throwing their eggs in the live.com basket and I’m liking what I see.

Perhaps, I’m somewhat biased because I was invited to their most recent Search Champs and got to see some of what they’ve been working on, including giving direct feedback on these macros, but event without that event I think the direction they are heading in with Live.com is positive.

Will Microsoft ever threaten Google in the search arena?
One of the main issues if they ultimately want to be any threat to Google is figuring out how to pump traffic back out through their search. MSN has a ton of traffic, they are one of the largest sites in the world, so they have the muscle to push in the traffic department and I hope they start sending that in the direction of third party websites through search results. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating many times and loudly. If they do that then watch out Google, the game could be on. Seriously.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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