Randy, at the RSS Blog, has more info on Technorati’s Performance of late. While Technorati says response time is down:

David Sifry: Since beginning our infrastructure improvements, Technorati’s uptime has improved significantly. [cut] According to GrabPerf,
even while our overall traffic has increased, our response times have
consistently decreased. [cut] The index is over 3 years old, currently
21.5 million blog posts. [cut] Our median time to index is now under 3
minutes from the moment a blog post is created.

Randy noted the increased splogs (spam blogs) now showing up in the search results and the poor indexing speed he’s seen lately.

While the case can be made that faster is an improvement, most of us use Technorati for research and if the results are bad, the usefulness is gone.