Just thinking outloud. Lot's of folks are unhappy with Technorati. Technorati has two goals which seem to be giving it a lot of difficulty: comprehensiveness and timeliness. They're trying real hard to watch all of the blogosphere as fast as possible. The scale issue, especially with the explosion of spam blogs, puts severe constraints on the choice of indexing and search algorithms they can use. The speed issue sets up unrealistic expectations, which frankly, I'm not sure add much value. The pre-eminence of the scoop mentality is just a transference from mainstream journalism and doesn't really work on the Web.
What if Technorati developed and promoted another smaller, slower archive? Slower meaning the index is only updated say once a day, or even once a week. Smaller meaning it has a much higher, but transparent, threshold of what constitutes a "blog" and what gets indexed. With the added slack, more sophisticated algorithms for eliminating spam blogs could be incorporated. Similarly, interesting query and navigation tools, like Adina Levine's conversation clouds, could be built. Sure they wouldn't be realtime but sometimes it's good to slow down. Also, given the temporal nature of blogs, useful retrospection tools could be built.
As an added exemplar, Google News severely compromises on the scale axis, but in return provides other useful functionality, e.g. topic clustering.