Twingly.com is a blog search engine that purports to provide spam-free blog search results. The site features a regular blog search, a spam-free blog search (returns results only from blogs which have been officially approved) and a microblog search. Users can vote on the posts returned by the search results, and the number of votes, called “Likes”, is shown beside each post in the list of search results. Users can also choose to subscribe to a set of search results via RSS or email. For example, if a user searches using the term “free software”, on the results page they are given the opportunity to click on a link that will provide them with RSS or email alerts when new entries are added to the search results for those terms. Users also have the ability to filter search results by rank (number of Likes), source, time, and language. The site also features an advanced search that allows users to apply any of the above filters to the search criteria before searching. In addition, the advanced search feature allows users to do searches for results containing all of the words, the exact phrase, without the words and with at least one of the words. Also users can search the posts within a blog, posts that link to a page or site, and posts from a particular site or domain. Twingly was launched in 2007 by a Swedish company headed by Martin Kallstrom, who is currently the CEO. The Chief Technical Officer at Twingly is Bjorn Milton. The site currently serves tens of millions of monthly searches, and continues to grow at a steady rate. The company’s first product was an API which serves in-house search results to large sites, and this API allowed them to start Twingly with a large database of search results. The current Alexa page rank for Twingly is well below 50,000. Twingly’s main competition is Technorati, Google BlogsSearch and URLFan. While the results at Twingly are not yet as accurate as their competition, they do have less spam (links to fake blogs that contain only advertising). In addition, Twingly is the only one of the four to offer a Microblog search that searches several microblogging sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Twingly’s advanced search features are also more capable than the competition. The Twingly site has a very clean, uncluttered look. The site displays no advertising. The main feature of the home page is a large search bar, similar to Google’s, except that the colors are more pleasing. Navigation is simple, with buttons for the regular blog search, the spam-free blog search and the microblog search. A link is provided to the advanced search page. The search results pages are also clean and uncluttered, and include a “Likes” button that users can click to vote for an entry, and links to subscribe to the results via RSS or email. The site is very responsive, with search results returned in a few seconds at most and page loads that are near instantaneous. Most functions can be performed at Twingly without registering. Registration is required in order to use the email subscription feature. The registration process is simple, asking only for username, password and email address. Validation of the email address is required. Twingly is free and there is no premium membership offered or available. Twingly is recommended to anyone who follows the blogging world and needs a good method for filtering the results from the millions of blogs on the web. The results are relevant, each result gives a brief summary of the post and the ranking system gives an indication of a post’s popularity. Twingly is also recommended to anyone who wishes to search microblogs – this feature is nearly unique to Twingly; the only near competitor in this area would be Twittersearch, which searches only Twitter. The ability to subscribe to search results via RSS or email is also a welcome feature. With the ranking system being used by Twingly, the results will only get better with time.

• Ability to do a regular blog search, spam-free blog search, or microblog search
• Ability to apply filters to search results
• Advanced search offers large number of criteria
• RSS or email subscription to search results
• Search results ranked by number of “Likes” (votes) received
• Microblog search searches several microblog sites including Twitter and Facebook

http://www.twingly.com/