Blog Search Engine company Technorati raises a third round to become the all encompassing blog search engine (that never works):

Technorati received a $10.52 million investment in June from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. The investment was revealed in a SEC filing on June 22 and made public on Monday. VentureWire reported the investment in its popular newsletter this week.

Andreas Stavropoulous of DFJ and Ryan McIntyre of Mobius were previous investors in Technorati and have occupied board seats for close to two years.

Technorati took an angel round of investment in the summer of 2003 from a few individuals including Esther Dyson and Joi Ito and used the money to turn a side-project into a full-time business. In August 2004 Technorati took additional funding and board members, investing in servers and a new colocation center while bringing on additional staff members, growing the company from 5 people and what I call "the back of the liquor store colo" to over 30 people with servers hosted in a former tank factory.

For me Technorati is amazing, it hardly delivers useful search results (there are many better engines) if it works at all - still many of the backlink searches I do simply time out and do not ask abot the XML API.

On the other hand technorati has built a strong brand - it is THE provider for news from the blogosphere and it's amazing growth. Most bloggers take daily looks at their backlinks there to find other bloggers that qoute them. Technorati also secured Google Rankings as it made sure the blogosphere linked to them in each post supposedly for better search results and traffic from Technorati (alas linking in tags usually does not change anything at all).

Congrats on developing Technorati so much over the years (despite its time outs, there are many cool features) and selling the vertical search story to investors.