Sweden-based blog search engine Twingly goes live today for the general public after a 3000-strong beta user base pounded on the servers for a few months. They even had us all load test it a few weeks ago asking us to take it down in the international Twingly Server Meltdown Hour, which apparently went off with little performance slowing at all. The blog search service aims to filter out the spam blogs, delivering just the content you're looking for and nothing more.
There's also their nifty way of getting more traffic for your blog by using their link sharing tool called Blogstream. Twingly's Blogstream has become "a huge hit in Europe" with reportedly 45 Twingly Partners (mostly Swedish) using the Blogstream Widget, including the country's two largest print publications, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet.
The social search features of the site are intriguing, with Digg-like buttons on each search result allowing users to "link/like" the most relevant results. This is something I still don't understand why Google Blog Search hasn't yet adopted. Technorati of course has a weighting of relevancy using its authority score for each blog result, which is derived from how many links the blog has received on the web. Twingly's social angle could prove more useful once a real user base develops over there. As of now, most results have at most one or two "likes" which doesn't really help at this point.
They are also featuring a "What's Hot Now" stream of popular keywords, though I think they're not even close to how effective Technorati is in that regard. In the end, Twingly's worth a look, and could end up a strong #3 or 4 player in the blog search game behind Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Sphere.
