Will Google buy Technorati?

Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch says that the management of Technorati, the largest blog search engine, is becoming very liberal about sharing its unique visitor and page view numbers. The company is privately held, so the information would usually be kept confidential.

Technorati has been in competition with Googlen Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) blog search property, a natural extension of its huge blog creation site Blogger.

According to Technorati's numbers, it has over nine million unique visitors a month. That would make it more than half the size of Photobucket or Facebook, both Top 50 sites according to comScore. It would also make the company valuable to Google, which, with 114 million unique visitors in February, still trails Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) at almost 129 million.

With Blogger already a large traffic driver for Google, owning the largest blog search property would clearly be a good fit.

No good banker would let Technorati go without other bids, if, indeed, it is for sale. That means that at the very least, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) would have to look at it to strengthen its Live Search and MSN audiences. Yahoo! obviously would not want to be left out.

There are not many internet properties for sale that have nearly 10 million unique monthly visitors, so the interest in Technorati should be intense.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.