Bit.ly Wants To Predict The Future With Realtime Social Search

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Screen Shot 2011-10-13 at 3.02.46 PM

Link shortening service Bit.ly just announced the launch of its beta search platform and “reputation monitoring” service for its paying Enterprise customers.

Apparently Bit.ly has been crawling every URL its shorten for “virality” (I guess that’s what they were doing all this time) in an attempt to provide a snapshot of content that’s trending and interestingly enough content that’s going to trend through user search.

“Instead of pagerank we’re using a different filter — for any given search query, we display the stories that we predict will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. Then we use bitly’s analytics to refine our predictions in realtime. Our search technology is based on the most valuable measure of engagement: the click.”

As the first public part of its realtime social search initiative, the company is rolling out a sentiment analysis system that it will be offering to Enterprise users who want to beta test.

The company’s blog post holds that unlike a traditional clipping or trending engine what ever this will be will basically predict the future, as an “early-warning system” alerting you to “swings” in what people are saying about your brand, for example.

As someone who misses Google realtime search I’m actually excited for this product, just wish I (or my company) didn’t have to pony up $955 a month for it.


Company: bitly
Website: bit.ly
Launch Date: 2008
Funding: $30M

bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier. bit.ly can be accessed through our website, bookmarklets and a robust and open API. bit.ly is also integrated into several popular third-party tools such as Tweetdeck. A more full list of third party tools can be found on the bit.ly blog. Unique user-level and aggregate links are created, allowing users to view complete, real-time traffic and referrer data, as well as location...

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