Webware

The real-time search company OneRiot is launching an advertising play for Twitter. The new feature, called RiotWise, lets content companies push links to their stories on the OneRiot search result pages. It's unlike every other online ad play out there in that the advertisements are for content, not commerce.

Say you're doing a OneRiot search for "Paris." Instead of seeing ads for airfares and hotels, as you would on Google, you'll see instead links to "Featured Content" about Paris from content producers -- news sites, blogs, and online magazines.

For the user, these are useful links, and thus valuable. But pulling this off for content is harder than it is for commerce, both financially and technically.

RiotWise will display "featured content" alongside natural search results.

(Credit: OneRiot)

On the money side, online content pays less, per page, than commerce. A single click on a news story is monetized primarily by advertising. A good news page makes a few pennies per page view. Most make far less. A commerce page designed to sell something, clearly, can make a lot more.

And on the tech side, there are vastly more content pages than there are ads, so matching a story to a search result page means that the OneRiot system has to do more than just let advertisers say which page goes with which keywords. OneRiot has to read in content feeds from its advertisers in near real-time, and pitch to users only the best and most current stories from partners, based on user search terms and content inside the stories.

OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk (Elon's brother) says that the company's advertising customers will find the incoming links from his service's users valuable, since OneRiot users are likely to redistribute (re-tweet) or forward stories along, thus increasing a story's presence.

It's a unique plan to monetize Twitter, but it's a delicate balance. Essentially it's an arbitrage model: Musk is asking publishers, who are paid by advertisers, to themselves pay for advertising on OneRiot to get more traffic, thus increasing their revenue yield per page. There's nothing fundamentally new about the concept (TV shows are advertised on TV all the time), but it's a bit of a tightrope. (Disclosure: I have heard that CBS is a partner of OneRiot, but Musk would not confirm this with me. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS. Update: More recently, I learned there is no such relationship between CBS and OneRiot.)

RiotWise ads will run on the OneRiot.com site, but the real potential for this plan, according to Musk, lies in the integration of RiotWise into Twitter apps. Potential customers are Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. In two weeks, a new application programming interface will let developers embed RiotWise suggestions into search results. OneRiot will share revenues with app developers for these paid links.

This is a smart play. Advertising will continue its move to the Web. When the economy begins to really turn around and general online advertising increases, the online pubs hosting these ads will need to generate additional pages to make good on their commitments to customers to deliver clicks. Thus OneRiot's plan may just work. It's not likely, however, that it will remain independent or unchallenged. This technology belongs at Google, or Microsoft. I expect it will end up there, one way or the other.

On Tuesday, OneRiot, the social search engine that rose from the ashes of social browser extension Medium, is adding video. Users will now be able to search through videos from more than 30 video hosts, and just as it handles Web queries, the engine will put recently "buzzing" videos on top. This means the results of any given search term will change on an almost daily basis depending on what's trending, or as OneRiot calls it "raging."

OneRiot Vice President Tobias Peggs dropped by CNET's San Francisco office Monday to give me a demo of the service, and it already looks promising. For instance, searching for "shark attack" pulled up some gruesome videos from the past few days. The same search on Google came up with clips from one to two years ago.

With OneRiot's algorithm, of course, it could be the same old videos that show up as the top result, but as Peggs told me, the search tool's value is that these older videos can rise up to the top simply due to their connection with something that's timely or has been revived by social chatter. In my case it was simply seeing a shark attacking a large piece of meat off the side of a fishing boat, a clip that had been vetted as worthy of a watch by OneRiot's social sources.

One thing that's missing from the system but that will be added in a week or two is a way to filter these results. For now it's sorted by buzz factor, but new filters will let you sort by both overall popularity and how fresh the link is. This should make it simpler to figure out what's old and what's not.

Along with the addition of video, OneRiot's front page is getting a bit of a refresh. Instead of just headlines for trending stories, the site will include short summaries of the news to give you a tease of what's behind the link. Peggs says this will continue to develop as the product matures, effectively making the front page of OneRiot something closer to Digg or Technorati. Expect the focus on this to grow if OneRiot continues to go into other search verticals such as images, music, and product search.

OneRiot's new video search organizes results based on what's trending or getting buzz from its social sources.

(Credit: OneRiot/CNET)