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.

Luxembourg-based Wikio, Europe’s best hope against Digg, Google News and Technorati (it is sort of a mashup of all three), has closed a €4 million ($5.3 million) Series A round of financing. This follows a previous angel round of financing of an undisclosed size (investors in that round included as Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Freddy Mini, Ouriel Ohayon, and Jeff Clavier). The financing round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.

The company recently launched English, German and Spanish versions of the site.

TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon is an investor and board member at Wikio, although we have no other conflicts with the company. Personally, I think Wikio has a lot of work to do before it can effectively compare itself to Digg, Technorati and others. This thing is no Skype.

Wikio, a user-contributed news company, launched Wikio.com, Wikio.de, and Wikio.es at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris today. The three new sites are aimed at the US, Germany, and Spain, respectively.

Wikio has been live in France and Italy for a few months. They have 600,000 French users and 100,000 Italian users.

In April, TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon reviewed Wikio and found it to be a very comprehensive news generating site. Ohayon became a shareholder in the company after reviewing the site. TechCrunch U.S., however, has no financial affiliation with Wikio.

Wikio is a hybrid between user-added and editorial-added news and blogs. They have an editorial staff that ranks and contributes stories but they also allow users to add and rank stories, much like Digg. User voting is balanced with editorial voting and stories are ranked accordingly. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio, developed the site based on his belief that Europe needed a Digg of its own.

“Wikio is the first service of its kind in Europe,” Chappaz said. “Europe is very different than the U.S. In the U.S., you have a large diversity of information services but in Europe, we only have Google News and to a certain extent, Yahoo News. If you look at Technorati, their index is far from being comprehensive. So Wikio is to establish new information in Europe coming from blogs as well as traditional media because we don’t see any reason to put a wall between blogs and traditional media.”

Chappaz said that Wikio.com was developed for the “English-speaking” population, although a UK-version of the site is Wikio’s next project, which will index British media.

“Obviously Wikio.com’s largest market is the U.S. and I would be delighted if Wikio takes a large market share in the U.S. but our main focus is still Europe,” Chappaz said.

One of the main barriers to Wikio becoming a true pan-European service is that there is little interoperability between the countries. You can link to stories from other countries’ Wikio sites, but there is no translation service. Each country has a different ranking algorithm for its stories based on the most popular news sources within that country. So you can search each country individually for news, but you can’t search for global activity.

“It’s difficult because there is a language issue. What we will offer in Wikio in the future is a possibility to search Wikio in all countries but you still have to understand the local language,” Chappaz said.

Wikio, a Switzerland based company, was released in private Beta yesterday night (in French). It is one of the most ambitious web launches born in Europe this year. Pierre Chappaz originated this idea after the successful adventure of his vertical ecommerce comparison engine Kelkoo, that was sold to Yahoo. He’s going to try to make it again but this time with an interesting news search service after he realized there was no true satisfactory solutions on the market. Wikio is a smart combination of Digg+Technorati+Google news. It should extend to other European countries and USA very soon.

Wikio is a really ‘web2.0′ news search engine where you can find interesting features and technology and where the role played by the user is very important. Wikio runs search on a library of sources, indexed and qualified manually, that is composed of online media (newspapers, etc..) but also edge content sites (blogs). And here is the first difference with Google News. They are covering more than 10,000 reliable sources (for France but for other country quantity will be important also) when Google News is covering only 500. Each piece of information is defined with a category (economy / high-tech) and a series of tags.

Wikio is a user managed news search engine. It watches, real time, thousands of news sources, gathers hundreds of thousands of stories every day and classifies them by their topics in a multi millions documents database. information classification is based both on its relevancy and on its members popularity who vote, discuss or even write new stories

The search algorithm is a combination of ‘logical’ and semantical requests that will enable association with other relevant words. Only Accoona is able to run search like that to our knowledge. On the technological side Wikio has also developed a tool that will convert any web source in RSS format.

Indexing the sources and building the algorithm took about one year of development.

A social search engine

Here is where Wikio will outperform other players. They integrated all sorts of web2.0 features so the user will be able to improve the relevancy of the results. They integrated for each search results the already very popular rating /comment system you can find in Digg for example. But unlike Digg (which is mainly tech-oriented although you can virtually post anything) Wikio will cover all categories of information. The user will also have the possibility to edit a news in a given category/tag and each page results is equipped with a mini-wiki ready to be edited.

You can if you wish create your own profile and store your favorite search queries always available at hand. Pierre Chappaz mentioned they would also store your search history as well as clicked and rated news.

The user interface is quite clear and in a way familiar (digg structure / search ). You can easily re-order results according to date/ popularity/ and relevancy and change in a click font size. Each search query is coming with an RSS feed you can subscribe. And one of the most interesting aspects is the automatically generated tag cloud for each query that will help you extend your search intuitively. So if you run a search on TechCrunch it will lead you to web2.0 or blogs or podcasts……

Wikio will soon include podcast search and I would love to see a picture and video search feature to make it complete.

It will open to the public in the next few weeks and will quickly extend to most European countries and USA.

The company is managed by Pierre Chappaz and has ten other employees. It is self financed but will consider a first round by the end of the year. Business model will be based on integration of sponsored links and Wikio bets on viral marketing and the quality of its product to reach critical size (could we suggest integration of sharing features, forward to a friend or even APIs to build mashups and widgets for Typepad/Wordpress).

Challenge and Assets

Will Wikio manage to become a reflex as Kelkoo, Google or Technorati did? That is the question. Wikio certainly has strong assets in Europe where competition and localization is close to non-existing (Google news is very limited and they never managed to impose Froogle vs Kelkoo) but they will have to face serious and well funded US players like Technorati, NewsVine and recently acquired NewRoo. Social news is a crowded space and Wikio will be a new feature to bookmark but we can trust Pierre Chappaz expertise in building successful stories to make it happen.

Wikio is a very ambitious project and has a strong technology with a skilled team in vertical search. This is certainly the most interesting European initiative since Skype. To be continued.

You can subscribe to the beta version here. Wikio and Pierre Chappaz blogs (in French only).