Technorati was a search engine and a publisher advertising platform that served as an advertising solution for the thousands of websites in its network. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008, and at one time was one of the largest ad networks reaching more than 100 million unique visitors per month. The name Technorati was a portmanteau of the words technology and literati, which evokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism. In 2016, Synacor acquired Technorati for $3 million. The company's core product was previously an Internet search engine for searching blogs. The website stopped indexing blogs and assigning authority scores in May 2014 with the launch of its new website, which is focused on online publishing and advertising. Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California, USA. Kevin Marks was the site's Principal Engineer. Tantek Çelik was the site's Chief Technologist. The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and Best of Show. It was nominated for a 2006 Webby Award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps. Technology Technorati used real-time market insights to optimize digital advertising interactions across its publisher network with the use of technology designed to help publishers get discovered by advertisers and earn more for their content. Reception In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which then claimed to track 27.7 million blogs, did not take into account MySpace blogs, of which she said that there were 56 million. As a result, she said that the utility of Technorati as a gauge of blog popularity was questionable. However, by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace blogs. In May 2006, Technorati teamed up with the PR agency Edelman. The deal earned a lot of criticism, both on principle and as a result of Edelman's 2006 fake blog scandals. Edelman and Technorati officially ended the deal in December 2006. That month, Oliver Reichenstein pointed out that the so-called "State of the Blogosphere" was more of a PR-tool and money maker for Edelman and Technorati than a reliable source, explaining in particular: a) why Technorati/Edelman's claim that "31% of the blogs are written in Japanese" was "bogus", and b) where the financial profit for the involved parties was in this. In May 2007, Andrew Orlowski, writing for the tech tabloid The Register,