Image via CrunchBase
Bit.ly recently released its private Beta for Realtime, described by Bit.ly as its “attention ranking engine.” Digital Trends described Realtime as “a hybrid between Google‘s search engine and Twitter‘s tending topics.” The search engine is consumer-focused and follows Bit.ly’s repetition monitoring tool launched to Enterprise subscribers in 2011. Realtime will have a newsfeed that gathers content shared on Bit.ly’s servers to list the top viral news being shared throughout the world at specific moments. The search engine has a filter that allows users to surface top trending news based on keywords, topic, country, and website. Results can then be further refined based on language and the social networks that the shortened URLs are being clicked through. Social networks that can be filtered include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Ameblo, a Japanese social network.
Because the Realtime engine focuses on top stories of the moment, the stories will disappear from the feed after they lose attention and the search results are not archived. Digital Trends tried the private beta and noted that there needs to be more refinement with the algorithm, and also concluded that “Realtime’s results are more objective to a fault — there’s no way to filter based on user interest.”
Own a local business?