Spam-Free Blog Searches

Swedish startup Twingly has launched a blog search engine designed to deliver spam-free search results.

Spam blogs are now considered to stand for the majority of the blog posts worldwide, according to the company.

“It’s very important for consumers and companies, which want to monitor their brand, to find quality content, and spam currently makes that difficult,” said Twingly CEO Martin Källström.

To keep spam out, Twingly uses its own algorithm.

“Instead of using a black list, which is the traditional way of filtering out spam, we use a white list, which includes good blogs,” said Källström.

One thing its algorithm does when adding a new a blog to the white list is look at other blogs it links to. Linking to other known spam-producing blogs is usually a bad thing.

Besides keeping spam away from search results, Twingly has been built to support many languages and has a distinct European feel to it. Its goal is to become the biggest blog search in Europe, according to Källström.

Until now the market for blog search engines has been dominated by U.S. companies like Google, and their tools don’t work as well in Europe.

“It’s the traditional problem for American companies, which first builds a product for its home market, and then runs in to problems when they try to adapt it for the European market with its many languages. Our product has been built from the ground up to support that,” said Källström.

The search engine is currently in private testing. Twingly’s goal is to release it during the second quarter

Twingly, which was founded in 2006, already offers a search engine for about 150,000 Swedish blogs.

It also works with newspapers showing which blogs link to their articles.