FAQ

What is Twingly?

Twingly is a spam-free blog search engine. Yes, spam-free. As in: no spam.

We use this search engine as the basis for developing kick-ass products. Right now, the two most popular are Twingly Blogstream - a widget connecting traditional media to the Blogosphere, and Twingly Screensaver - a visual representation of the real-time state of the blogosphere.

While our eventual goal is nothing short of world dominance, we are currently focusing our efforts on European blogs. However, our index already includes blogs from all over the world and is expanding rapidly.

Spam-free?

Besides our full index, Twingly provides a spam-free search index. Our servers are working hard every day to grow the spam-free index to include more and more blogs. In order to accomplish this, we utilized a massive scale chain of trust. Basically we create a whitelist of approved blogs which we grow using the link structure of the blogosphere.

When an approved blog links to another blog, that blog also gets approved after a while. But once in a while even real blogs link to fake blogs, which means that there will be a leak in the chain of trust. The spammy blog that gets approved will in turn approve potentially thousands of other spam blogs. When we detect this (i.e. through users reporting spam), we can follow the chain of trust upstream to find the faulting link and remove it. Which then disapproves the entire cluster of spam blogs.

In reality there is much more involved than this, since a fake blog very often links to real blogs as well, making the case more compicated. But the final result is in any case a very powerful data structure for identifying and removing large clusters of fake blogs.

Why use Twingly instead of Technorati, Google or Sphere?

We develop the world’s best spam-free blog search engine.

We strive to provide higher quality search results and better community features than any other engine.

I can’t find my blog posts!

Sorry, our bad. To remedy this: ping us and make sure you’re reasonably popular among your friends. Also make sure that your RSS feed validates properly.

Are you spammer? Then you won’t find your blog posts here.

How do I ping automatically?

Add http://rpc.twingly.com/ to your blog tool's list of ping services. That way, Twingly will be notified every time you write a new blog post.

Blog platforms that support automatic pings:

• Wordpress
• B2
• Movable Type
• Typepad

Blog platforms that doesn't support automatic pings:

• Wordpress.com
• Blogger (blogger.com / blogspot.com)

How do I ping manually?

If your blogging platform doesn’t support automatic pings, you can ping us manually.

Go to http://twingly.com/ping. Enter the url of your latest entry, your RSS feed or even easier – your blog’s front page url.

Twingly finds my blog posts, but they’re not showing up at the Twingly Partner Site I’ve linked to

Sit tight for a while. Depending on when your blog post was published and when we received the ping from your blog, it may take a while before it shows up in our partners’ widgets.

Check your RSS feed. Make sure you publish the entire content of your blog post, including the links.

Half an hour has gone by and there’s still nothing! What now?

Check that your RSS feed is valid. You can do this with for example Feed Validator. Are links published as html-links in the feed? Is it publishing your entire blog post? If you’re just publishing a section of your blog post and the link to the Twingly Partner Site is not in that section, you won’t get a link back form the Partner site. Make sure you publish your entire blog post.

Also, try to find your blog post through searching on twingly.com. If you find your post, please contact the Twingly Partner directly, since the problem is probably not located within our system.

Be aware that the Twingly Partner Sites can themselves limit, exclude or ban blogs due to unsuitable words, illegal content or the like. We don’t have any control over what the Twingly Partners are doing with the data we’re throwing at them.

Still doesn’t work? Please send a mail to support@twingly.com.

What is BlogRank?

BlogRank is our way to show how popular a blog is within the language group it belongs to. Because we use the language grouping it will be a lot more easier to compare blogs in different languages.