In the past, we reported that Bitly, the popular link-shortening service online, had been raising funds and gearing up for the launch of a viral search engine of its own. The idea was to create a search engine where users will be able to view the most popular and buzzing online news related to a given topic. Now, the company has released a private beat of just such a search engine.

This viral search engine is aptly named ‘Realtime.’ The name is self-explanatory in that the search engine will indeed be working in real-time. The best part for Bitly is that it doesn’t have to rely on another service or to create a new one.

To gauge the popularity of given news, Bitly has developed a simple mechanism. It aggregates all the links that have been shortened by Bit.ly users. After that, it calculates the number of people clicking on each of these links. This, naturally, shows which links are popular and which are not. It also gives the user the ability to filter the popularity of links based on region, topic, language and keyword.

According to the company, this is an ‘attention ranking engine.’ And that is quite true, since the engine shows such results at the top which are successfully able to gather the attention of online audience in real-time. RealTime can prove to be very helpful for the reporters and researchers who are digging for such news stories which are trending in real-time. Whereas Twitter may show what topics are trending in real-time, it usually don’t tell the kind of articles or stories which are popular. And Realtime can fill that gap.

If you wish to try yourself on this private beta of Realtime, you can request access via your bitly account.

Source: Bitly blog

Courtesy: The Verge

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