As many of you might already know, Bitly is the largest Link Shortening service.
In fact, it is the one responsible for ushering the world into the
concept of short links four years ago. Since then, it has been
extensively been used to replace long URLs into a collection of just a
few characters, which can be easily shared on social media such as Facebook
and Twitter. It came is handy especially for twitter, where there is a
character limit on tweets. Well now, after almost four years, Bitly has
finally collected enough data to create a whole new search engine of its
own! Bitly calls it "Real-time", and describes it as an "Attention
Ranking" Search Engine. Although still in its beta phase, it has been
rolled out to the public. It can be accessed at http://rt.ly.
What is the Realtime project?
No, it isn't another search engine like Yahoo or Bing that've been
inspired by Google. Well, inspired maybe. Competition, no. Bitly's
Realtime is a different sort of search engine. It can be thought of as a
cross between Google's search, and Twitter's Trending topics.
Bitly has been hard at work expanding its business influence. In
January, it updated its enterprise dashboarding system, and it
redesigned its structure in May, which made it more of a Social
Bookmarking service than a URL shortner. With a latest round of funding
by Khosla Ventures, and the announcement of this new search engine, it's
pretty clear Bitly wants to make a much greater mark on the internet.
How does it work?
Bitly's Realtime is aimed at providing users with the most viral news at
the moment from around the world. It tracks every URL that has been
shortened, and then shared on social media. The top links clicked every
minutes are listed in the Realtime news feed.
That isn't the power of the project though, far from if. The really
useful feature comes with the search filters. It has really easy to use
search filters. Like any search engine, you can search for news based on
keywords. You can also bring up targeted results based on country, and
even audience's language. Just like Google's site search feature, you
can search keywords from any single domain (such as
mybloggertricks.com).
The most powerful features though, are search by Topic, or search on
social media. There's a list of topics you can choose from.
Additionally, you can choose from among five social medias presently,
including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Ameblo (a Japanese
Social network-cum-blogging community). You can, for example, search for
"best strategies" (keyword) for "advertising" (topic) on Twitter
(social network).
Join the service now!
For bloggers, every new internet service that they can somehow use is a
possible opportunity. A lot of you might already be shortening your
links to share on Twitter and other social media. If you already are
using Bitly, then there's good news for you! Your content might get
searched, making your content viral and reachable to a whole new
audience you never knew existed!
Remember that this search engine relies only on the data from links that
have been shortened using Bitly. If you've never used Bitly to shorten
your links, then your content will not be searched, simple as that!
This service not only encourages users to use Bitly's link shortening
service, but also to share their content on social media. The incentive
being a potential for a lot more traffic. Millions of people are looking
for the most popular and recent news at any time. The Realtime news
feed could be another source for them. This is a whole new concept, and
has a lot of potential to grow. Well played Bitly. I'm sure many others
will now follow their lead.
So get yourself registered with Bitly now, and start shortening and sharing to get your awesome content listen and become reachable to millions of people worldwide!