Swedish startup Twingly opened up its blog search engine to the public this morning. It now covers 30 million blogs, and results can be sorted by authority (number of incoming links) or most recent posts. There is also a spam-free search option that only brings back results from the hundreds of thousands of white-list blogs it knows to be real. (Read our earlier coverage, for more details).
It is hard for any blog search engine to take on Google Blog Search or Technorati at this point, but Twingly is givingit ago. And it’s European focus and translation features could help it carve out a niche.
CEO Martin Kallstorm highlights some of his search engine’s features on the Twingly Blog:
- Spam free search
- Social search. The users enhance the search results by voting on posts they like. Bloggers enhance the search results by linking to posts they like
- Subscribe to search results by RSS and alerts via email
- Language functionality: Translation of search results and filtering based on language
- Twingly widget platform. Parts of Twingly.com can be incorporated into blogs
- Hot Right Now. Overview on hot topics in the blogosphere
- User directed development through a tech plan open for voting.
Any search term can be subscribed to via RSS. Results can be voted up. And, best of all, users can vote on what Twingly should work on next.
Today, the company is also releasing widgets that blogs can put on their sites that show recent posts, recent links, and most linked-to posts. Here are examples for TechCrunch and you can create your own widget here.
is technorati still a company? i used to use it everyday and I don’t think I have done a search there once in the last year. talk about squandering huge market share…
Wow…. Another Web 2.0 innovation.
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John
You can also try http://www.blogdimension.com which is active on the blog search segment and now more generally on Live Web since 2005! Exists in five languages and soon three more versions to be released. Not to mention its microblogs, audio and video searches…
Give it a try, there are many alternatives to the Big 5! and still much room for initiatives like Twingly and Blogdimension.
Well, I looked for ‘BlogArena’ (our blog portal), and I am satisfined with Twingly.
so what is different from google blog search?
I love this new idea of a blog search engine. Hopefully Twingly will catch on cause i plan on using it for years to come, I love blogging.
Spam free? Doesn’t look very spam free to me: http://www.twingly.com/search?.....=published
Good, focused blog search is in demand! I went over and their index seems pretty much up to date. All but our latest posts from yesterday showed up. I’ll keep trying it out.
The Twingly homepage is already not loading for me. Maybe they weren’t ready for the public . . .
@hostyle: there are two modes. “Classic” and spam-free. The old version is still default. Push the other button:
http://www.twingly.com/search?.....%28beta%29
thanks
Hey…
i’d give a chunk of $$$ to see what bloggers/writers are doing across the blog network… a kind of rating site based on user rating, as well as the number of times the the article is/has been read/linked to, etc….
this kind of function would allow a blog owner to be able to know who he/she might want to approach for articles, etc… it would give the reader a way to know who’s writing/creating good product, and who’s creating garbage… it would also be a way for the author/writer to know where he/she stands compared to other writers/bloggers…
as far as i can tell.. this doesn’t exist.
i’d also like to see a service/product to tell the size (readers/views) of a given website so i as an advertiser could determine who i want to talk to regarding advertising… without the service costing an arm/leg!!
peace
Not really much innovative… Technorati has all of the features as well, except the spam free searching (which isn’t working so good after all)
In their widgets, they have to get approval from content owners, don’t they?! They do not do now.
Interesting post and comments
Twingly seems like a pretty awesome site in a crowded search space. I particularly like the blog search feature. It needs more work, however. I searched “business” to find an awesome business blog and the results were pretty lame. http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog
I searched “c#” and nothing returned.
In their widgets,
Nice blog, i have added it to my favourites, greetings