what's up with the technorati service?

I've come to rely on technorati for a variety of blog search and vanity-checking needs, because it fills a need that isn't well covered by the standard search tools and the various blogspace servcies. I'm grateful to the developers for what they have created, it is an excellent and innovative service. But my experience over many months is that technorati's quality of service is highly variable, and frequently it is just plain weird. Right now is a good example -- it is slow at all hours of the day, it is not catching my new posts even when manually pinged, and I have seen several linked posts appear and then disappear from my link cosmos. Recently we had the compact vs extended listings, which was a nice speedup, but that seems to have gone away. So my perspective is that technorati's basic cosmos search functionality is not very stable and on the hairy edge of usability.

I realize that the universe of tracked blogs is growing fast, and that must create a few little challenges in scaling up the backend infrastructure ;-) (And sure, I'm way out on the long tail...) At the same time, I'm seeing new features (e.g., tagging, APIs etc), so I know the dev team isn't just sitting around reading feeds. But folks, this isn't the 1990's anymore, and our expectations of search services have been set very high by our friends at google.

So I guess I have to ask, what are technorati's priorities, and when should we expect the basic cosmos search capabilities to stabilize at a reasonable and consistent level of service?