Twingly is a new Swedish-based blog search engine. I was as well got a private beta access for a glimpse into the future of blogs search provided by Twingly. Frankly, blog search has been a daily habit for me in order to look for the new startups to be profiled on TagEdge. As a Chinese educated and a third-generation of Chinese immigrant to South-East Asian countries, I tend to use Baidu Blog Search most for of the time; otherwise Google Blog Search. In response to this Twingly, a new blog search engine in private beta phase, my first thought is that I am oblige myself to examine it whether it will become one of blogging tools to be used in the future.

Two questions while I evaluate Twingly are how it trying to differentiate itself among all the big players such as Google Blog Search, Baidu Blog Search, Technorati, etc. in the blog search sector and will this competition drive a better blog search engine for the end-users as well as the next-generation of blog search.

If you’re giving access to Twingly, you’ll notice that below the search bar, there are few search queries entered by beta users under the topic of “Hot right now.” which they claimed these are the placeholder links on Twingly. It seem that Twingly is focused on the U.S. market right now as all the search queries such as Election, Obama, Iphone are mostly related to the American. As I type few queries to Twingly, the search results showed on Twingly can be sorted out based on Twingly Rank (their internal ranking system of blog posts), date or inlinks (this means the inbound links from other sites). From the search results, you can further sort the results based on your preference, by time (from anytime, last hour till last month), and languages as well.

Apparently, Twingly was trying to differentiate itself not from the aspect of frequency, since beta users will not come across the blog posts they indexed at 5mins, or 10mins ago, but from the quality of all the blogs they selected to index. The posts they indexed are reasonably reliable, from wordpress.com to CNN, Blogger.com. On the Twingly search engine, any search result page, you can sort the result page by “Any source” or “Spam-free blogs,” and either of them, the search results will be the same appeared on your computer screen. As such, I believe spam-free search will be their most important appeal to the end-users, and their vision is to surf safe while users connected to Twingly at anytime, anywhere.

The ranking of blog posts on Twingly is very straight-forward. The post that comprised of the top number of keyword you’ve entered to Twingly or with the most “Links/likes” will always go to the top, as shown in the picture below. The offering of their blog search engine want to bring values to the end-users in a dual way, i.e. the algorithm “keyword” manner and the other user-determine manner, which means beta users can vote their favorite blog posts and these posts will eventually rise to the top of the search result pages. In designing a complete user experience, a most thoroughly discussed and commented post should stay on the top for this reason.

I think Twingly is trying to be very open, and I like their way in operating their startup in this mode. They’ve a Tech Plan, which allowed beta users to submit suggestions on what they perceived Twingly as a startup in the future. The most wanted feature at this moment is blog claiming feature, which I think some beta users desperately want to claim the ownership of their blogs on Twingly. Others are a blog profile page, a Mac version of Twingly screensaver, a real-time visualization of the blogosphere in a map.

In overall, Twingly is not very convincing in term of fast indexing, frequency when compared to Google Blog Search, or even Technorati. I think the time is still not right for them in seeking for an architectural change, i.e. spam-free blog search instead of fast indexed blog search. Safe is not fast, and either one will require the other. However, Twingly will be included in one of blogging tools in my daily life.