OneRiot Launches Real-Time Video Search

Want to watch video that’s hot right this very second? Check out OneRiot, which today launched a version of its social search engine for video URLs. The company depends on real-time signals, such as how long people stay on a page and at what pace views are accumulating. It’s a kind of a multi-source version of Google Trends.

However, the effort is a little rough around the edges — for instance you can’t play videos on the results page; you have to click through. Also, there’s no information about why something is listed — the video is just presented in order of its “pulse rank” — which I find frustrating but OneRiot tells me its target audience of college students prefers. As for existing competition, we tend to like Viral Video Chart these days, and there’s always YouTube’s most-viewed (pretty much all of OneRiot’s results seem to come from YouTube anyways).

So what’s hot right now, according to OneRiot? Apparently the big thing this morning is bleeping out Obama and Oprah to make it sound like they’ve been censored for “dropping the F-bomb.” Wow, I really feel like I’ve really tapped the pulse!

OneRiot, which was previously called Me.dium, has raised a ton of funding — at least $20 million — so at this point it’s not even putting ads on its search results.