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.

Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley four or five years ago—hungry startups building Web companies on the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch.

Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. ParisBrussels-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it makes a feed reader with extra powers—you can leave comments on blogs within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others.

And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month (comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views). Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and 1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service.

Most of the startups I encountered, however, are still operating under the radar—in Romania, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, France. But a cross-border Web 2.0 culture is definitely gaining steam across Europe. Technology itself is helping to break down borders. A VC showed me the landing page on his mobile phone. It wasn’t his e-mail. It was Twitter. Another startup founder told me that Twitter helps him keep a dialogue going with other entrepreneurs and VCs across Europe, and even with contacts in the U.S.

Europe is still a mosaic of employment law, tax regulations, and cultural habits that can influence where it makes the most sense to locate different parts of a business. One Dutch CEO, for instance, told me that it costs you need a minimum of 18,000 Euros in starting capital just to incorporate in the Netherlands. And that is just the government’s fee.

When I asked which region was most likely to emerge as Europe’s Silicon Valley, the answers were all over the map: London, Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva, even Barcelona. The money is in London, cheap office space is in Berlin, the mobile expertise is in Helsinki, the weather’s nice in Barcelona, and the inexpensive engineers are in Estonia (which may not even consider itself part of Europe, but is close enough to manage from Berlin or Amsterdam).

As Europe searches for its Silicon Valley, it may turn up as a state of mind rather than a specific place. The truth is that Europe may not need a single Silicon Valley because business is becoming so distributed. While some Silicon-Valley chauvinists may disagree, the idea of concentrating all the talent and capital in one region seems so last century to many Euro 2.0 entrepreneurs.

(Photo © Pieter Baert).

Twingly, the Europe-focused blog search engine that I wrote about in January, has just entered private beta. You can sign up for an invitation on the home page, or go here for an instant invitation (the first 2,000 get in).

Twingly has a number of features that make it an attractive engine. First, they have a “no spam” search that only queries blogs that are known to Twingly to be actual, real, blogs. This is a white list approach that returns fewer results since most blogs are not included, but spam is virtually wiped out. Twingly currently has 450,000 approved blogs on the white list and is adding another 1,000 per day.

Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed – everything else is ignored.

Searches can be ranked by date (which is standard for blog search), by number of inbound links (the equivalent of Technorati authority) or by TwinglyRank, which is “a combination of keyword relevancy, number of inlinks, number of user recommendations, publishing date and time and some secret sauce.” Users can also perform language specific searches in any of 29 supported languages (they track another 31, but not accurately enough to deploy yet).

Twingly already has a product – a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver – mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs.

Founder Martin Källström says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has 44 live with large European publishers, generating 100 m widget views per month.

The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.

At first glance, blog search as a category is oversaturated. Ok, at second glance, too. Not only did Google enter the market directly in late 2005, they’ve also increased the rate that they index blogs and other regularly updated sites for core Google search. TechCrunch, for example, is now indexed multiple times per day by Google, and new posts are often available in a normal Google search within minutes of posting. Most people today say the best blog search engine is, simply, Google.com.

And there are many competitors. The Comscore chart below shows the relative traffic of the major ones – Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Sphere and IceRocket. Feedster is gone, although there are additional smaller engines like Zuula and Blogdigger as well. Every one of those companies is U.S. based (note that Paris-based Wikio has blog search as well as a Digg-like service).

Now Europe will have it’s own blog search engine – Twingly. I met Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. Their focus, he says, will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. Twingly’s search engine hasn’t launched yet, although I do have a screen shot of what the home page will eventually look like:

Twingly already has a product – a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver – mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs.

The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed – everything else is ignored.

Källström says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has some deals with large European publishers completed.

The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.