Wowd aims to replace PageRank with Popularity

Google has conspicuously avoided adding “real-time” search results to its search engine. By real-time, we mean the sort of results offered by Twitter — or items submitted a mere second or two earlier by any of a million sources.
There’s not even a real-time project in Google Labs. Now is a good time for startups to try to run ahead, grabbing market share and, hopefully, loyal customers.
Wowd is a Palo Alto-based startup packed with search engine veterans. CEO Mike Cassidy was a co-founder and CEO of Direct Hit back in the Web 1.0 days. Draper Fisher Jurvetson, KPG Ventures, and the Stanford University Engineering Venture Fund all provided seed capital.
I had a two-hour talk with CEO Mark Drummond about the technology behind Wowd. Here’s the gist of what it does: Instead of calculating the rank of Web content based on who links to who, Wowd weights content based on what gets clicked on. Wowd, to simplify, ranks results not based on what Internet users say, but on what they do.

That, plus a bunch of other factors including the time the content was published, are used to create a Popularity ranking for indexed content that changes by the minute.
Wowd can also sort results by Freshness, which is a spam-filtered reverse chronological order. There’s a Wowd toolbar, which is where the clicks on who clicked what get tracked. Drummond was intent on convincing me of Wowd’s smart privacy and security controls. What I wanted to know was how he’ll keep the content from becoming nerd-centric, like Digg.
Unlike Google, Wowd was designed from the ground up to be an index of tweets, and to update itself often within seconds rather than hours or days. Drummond says that enables Wowd to scale better than Google Translation: We’d love for Google to buy us. But Drummond says he thinks he can outrun Google, just as Google once outran AltaVista and Excite.
Wowd is currently in an invite-only beta testing phase. The first 300 VentureBeat readers who sign up at Wowd.com with with the invite code  jb05qhkop16d7n will be automatically approved instantly.