Online Observations

Technorati has been around forever it seems. It used to be my go-to place for searching blogs. Then Google Blog Search came and I started searching for blogs using Google (or more accurately, searching for topics inside blogs).

This trend was also seen in my WordPress Admin Dashboard which now uses Google Blog Search to show incoming links to my blog. There have of course been a large number of other blog search services through this time. Recently, however, there is a new contender which has been making ripples. It’s called Twingly.

Twingly is in a private beta right now, yet I hear a lot about it all over the Internet. All major blogs I read are reporting it. Apparently, Twingly is going to be a “SPAM FREE” blog search engine. Yes, that’s right.

How do they achieve this? From the FAQ“

Well, we work our way outwards from selected high quality blogs, discovering and including only those that are linked directly or indirectly to the quality “seed” blogs.

This, I think, is both good and bad. Using this engine, I will miss out on all the small time blogs which sometimes do have the most amazing and useful content. I mean it is obvious that you will need to be linked to by LifeHacker or BoingBoing through some channel else you will never be listed on their service.

I suppose that means this blog will never be listed on this service either. The good thing is that when you do search, your results will come from highly authoritative blogs (those are the only kinds the ‘high quality blogs’ will link to); which I guess is the idea behind it anyway.

Another thing claimed by the authors is that they will be coming out with more and more services based on their index of blogs. We will keep an eye of course for these.