Social bookmarking service Bit.ly recently announced a search engine tool that will be used to track the most successful viral news links across social networks in real time. According to the Bit.ly announcement, “Realtime” is an attention ranking engine which will allow users the power to navigate through stories the world is paying attention to at that current point in time.

Realtime

Realtime is optimised to surface the top viral news being shared at the moment throughout the world. Every piece of content saved, shortened and shared on Bit.ly is analysed, and the top links clicked on per minute will be listed in the Realtime newsfeed. What makes this service of particular use is its search engine. Its filters enable users to surface the top trending news based on the keywords, topic, country, and website. Results can be further refined based on the audience’s language and the social networks where the shortened URLs are being clicked on. The social networks users can filter include Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Ameblo (known as Ameba), a Japanese social network and blogging community.

Because the news that surfaces on Realtime represents the top results at the moment, according to Bit.ly, the “stories will only remain in the system as long as they are actively receiving attention,” and unlike Google, Realtime search results are not archived.

Trending Topics vs Realtime

In some ways, Realtime resembles Twitter’s trending topics, but there is an important difference. Twitter surfaces the most popular links that a user's followers are sharing. Realtime’s results are more objective to a fault — there is no way to filter based on user interest.

Work in progress

TechCrunch had a chance to try the private beta and noted that the algorithm needs to be further refined, with specific search terms delivering some unrelated topics. However, they noted that with Bit.ly’s traction in URL shortening, Realtime could soon become the go to reference for trending articles and sites. Bitly is continuing to expand beyond URL shortening, and the introduction of Realtime could make Bit.ly the premier destination for social attention ranking.

Realtime is currently in private beta. Existing Bit.ly account users can log-in to their account and request access to begin using the service. Non-Bit.ly users can register via social login or create a new Bit.ly account to receive access.