The link shortening tool, bit.ly, just announced a new search service with something called “reputation monitoring”. It’s not really a search engine, more of a buzz monitoring system.

As ZDNet reports:

In addition to several other factors, Google search results are influenced algorithmically by page rank. Because many tweets and blog posts haven’t even had the chance to establish any page rank yet due to how new they are, bit.ly now offers a way to monitor trending activity via search results using their own data, served up on their own platform.”
“Reputation monitoring” is a service that essentially lets users set up alerts on keywords or topics, much like Google alerts. Not so interesting for the casual Facebooker, but businesses might like this to see if/when their companies are getting slagged in a flamewar or buzzed about on Twitter.