How Bit.ly Now Predicts the Future #whoknew #cleverpeople #vision #refreshingtosee

Link shortening and social web analytics provider Bit.ly announced today the first Enterprise product built on top of its new search platform, a reputation tracking alert system.

Unlike other social media monitoring services, Bit.ly says it will predict which brand-new pages online will receive a lot of traffic in the future.

Thus what Bit.ly’s customers should pay attention to. How does it do that? How well does it perform?

Andrew Cohen, General Manager at Bit.ly, says that the company watches the huge number of links passed through its service and drills down to index their text content.

Using the Apache Lucene-based technology developed at LinkedIn called Zoie, Bit.ly determines what the most relevant parts of every page are, excluding footers, spammy comments and other cruft. The company then checks those parts of the page for customer-entered keywords and determines the relevance of the article shared. That’s non-trivial work and in at least one case I found a URL deemed relevant to a keyword when that keyword didn’t show up in the text - it was in the HTML keywords for the page only. I thought that was a stretch, myself. Once a page is deemed relevant to a customer keyword then its likeliness to go big is assesed.

Nice! Read the rest at RWW