The biggest challenge both search engines face is trying to keep their indexes spam-free and provide accurate results.

Enter Twingly Spam-free Blog Search.

Twingly takes on the blog search market with a home page that is somehwhere in between the between Google’s trademark spartan interface and Technorati’s crowded portal.

In terms of usability and design I think Twingly is defiantly the superior, sporting a suitably web 2.0 style look and easy to use interface. To me Technorati is far too crowded and Google’s blog search a little boring and lacking.

The main features as outlined by founder Martin Kallstorm are

- Spam free search
- Social search. The users enhance the search results by voting on posts they like. Bloggers enhance the search results by linking to posts they like
- Subscribe to search results by RSS and alerts via email
- Language functionality: Translation of search results and filtering based on language
- Twingly widget platform. Parts of Twingly.com can be incorporated into blogs
- Hot Right Now. Overview on hot topics in the blogosphere
- User directed development through a tech plan open for voting.

The only thing I don’t like about this is the need to register a new account to get full functionality from Twingly. Part of the fact Technorati’s ranking systems are no longer considered that accurate is because many people never use the voting or contribution features as they require logging in.

The technology behind the service is maybe the most important aspect, more so then the design or UI. Twingly has a pretty small index at this point of around 30 million blogs concentrated on the region of Europe. There is no explanation of how the Spam free blog service works and although the website has now been released publicly, spam-free search is still labelled as beta.

I think they stand a chance of competing with the aging Technorati, even after it receives 7.5 million in funding as reported by TechCrunch. Technorati is error-prone and losing popularity, Twingly is a fresh face which may or may not prove beneficial to blog owners and readers.

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Moreover, if you don’t use a very unique username, most likely you’ll sooner or later find out that your username has already been taken by someone else on a particular website. That forces you to choose another one and remember it or write it down. A good solution for storing such username password combinations for various services is KeePass but it doesn’t resolve the problem of multiple logins. The solution to this might be OpenID.

You simply create your openID account at one of openID providers (e.g. myOpenID ) and after that you can sign in to all OpenID enabled sites without having to re-enter login details on all of them.

You just provide your unique ID (username.openidprovider.tld) and that’s it. It could be especially useful if you don’t have the possibility to use features such as Opera’s Wand. One disadvantage is that the website must support it. However, the number of OpenID enabled sites is growing quite fast. Some of them are:

• ImageShack
• Technorati
• Ma.gnolia
• Crunchy
• Rootly

Another disadvantage is that if someone steals your identity, he could gain access to all of your accounts on these websites. Does not make a difference for users who do use the same username and password on all sites though.

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