The Musk name is famous among techies thanks to high-profile companies like PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric car maker, which were founded or funded by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Now another Musk-backed start-up is looking to make a splash. Only this time it’s younger brother Kimball at the helm, as CEO for OneRiot.

OneRiot is launching a real time search engine on Tuesday that combs through the flood of messages and Web links that are shared through services Twitter and Digg, as well as in OneRiot’s existing browser toolbar product, to determine the hottest topics on the Internet.

Real Time search, of course, is all the rage right now, thanks in large part to the success of microblogging service Twitter, which allows users to search the “Tweets” generated on its service and to zoom into what people are saying about a particular topic that very moment.

Musk says that Twitter searches the conversations people are having, while OneRiot cuts through the “noise” and focuses on the content at the center of those conversations.

OneRiot analyzes the links people share to determine which news article or video is getting a lot of buzz; the company’s algorithm ranks the importance of the content according to criteria like the influence of the person sharing the link and the momentum the link has gained through re-Tweets.

Twitter recently said it was developing new features for its search engine that sound somewhat similar, and there’s plenty of other rivals in the nascent field of real time search.

OneRiot has raised roughly $20 million from three VC firms, including Twitter-backer Spark Capital, over the past couple of years, and Elon Musk pitched in as an angel investor.

Keep an eye on:

• Media mogul David Geffen tried to buy a stake in the New York Times Co from hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, but was rejected (Reuters)

• MarketWatch.com is launching a redesigned site aimed at bringing in sophisticated professionals while keeping its news free, even as parent company News Corp explores ways to get people to pay for its journalism online (Reuters)
• Microsoft is on track to release its new Windows 7 operating system in time for the holiday shopping season, confirming talk it is ahead of its own conservative schedule for replacing the unpopular Vista system (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)