TechStars brings aspiring technology founders to Boulder, Colorado for an intensive three month period, provides seed funding, education, and connections, and will result in the formation of ten new companies during the summer of 2007.
Techstars gives driven people a way to make it happen! And we here at Lijit are nothing but driven. Lijit is a huge idea of re-building Internet Search from the ground up, starting with the data individuals forage on the Internet and the relationships that help shape that data into information. We released our first service about a month ago and it was a natural to try out on Techstars!
Using the Lijit Search Wijit on the TechStars website, you can search the knowledge base of all the Techstars Mentors at once. Not just their blogs, but their del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, and even others that influence their opinions.
Give it a try! Search on “Venture Funding”…something near and dear to an entrepreneur’s heart! See what the Techstars Mentors have said and bookmarked.
We think Techstars is awesome, and what could be better than searching for entrepreneurial subjects through entrepreneurial eyes!
Sure it’s cool for your search to cover not only your own content, but also that of folks in your network. Damn cool in fact. Which makes it frustrating that it’s so difficult to set up your network.
We hear you, and we feel it too.
For now, you can add other folks to your network by one of two ways:
If they are a Lijit user, simply go to their profile page and click the “trust” button. (It’s in the block with their picture.)
If not, click the “Add RSS Informer” button up by the Lijit logo. Then enter the URL of their RSS feed.
We’re working on what is (IMHO) the most obvious solution for a blog: tying your network to your blogroll. After all, blogroll links represent the largest open social network around.
Today we added a Search Wijit customizer. If you’ve already have a Wijit installed, you can now match it to your blog. Just go to the Wijit pickup page. And if you don’t yet have a Wijit, well then sign up and get one!
Google Custom Search is cool. And it’s a natural step for Google to distribute their search technology (dare I say “longtail-ize”?) in the same way that they distributed their ad technology when they expanded Adwords (on their domain) into Adsense (on anyone’s page). So it was a natural fit for us to use it as the backend for our Lijit Personal Network Search, and we’ve been happy with the initial results.But it’s not perfect.
Ethan Zuckerman wrote about problems with Co-op search back in October, and Google quickly responded with a fix. However, we’re seeing a lot of Ethan’s problems here at Lijit as well. The problem is that if your desired search results would not normally fall in the top 1000 results of a normal Google search, they don’t get included in your results. For example, Brad Feld has written a ton about Microsoft in his blog at feld.com as can be seen in a typical site: Google search. However, when you use a Co-op search which includes feld.com/*, you don’t get any results fromthat domain. The problem seems to be that feld.com doesn’t make it into the top 1000 results for a normal search for ‘”microsoft”. In a similar vain, if you search me for “sex” you’ll get stuff from BoingBoing (a high PageRank site) but not my post “Attention is Meme Sex” like you might expect.*
So it seems that the fixes implemented for Ethan aren’t working across the board. But I am encouraged by Google’s response to Ethan and hope that they will eventually be able to solve our issues.
I have been doing A LOT of research with regards to Internet Search over the last couple weeks. There is an amazing amount of information available. One thing that becomes crystal clear is why Google is making giant piles of cash everyday..
The Global Market for Ad placement in Search is currently in excess of $17B annually. Wow, as a good friend once said, you know your market is correct when it ends in a B.
Statistically if you are a consumer you will give up really fast if you don’t find what you want, maybe a search query or two, and you almost never look at page 2 of your results.
If you are doing research for work, you typically will search for quite a while, often a half hour or more. And if you don’t find your information, Mr. Researcher, which happens the majority of time, over 50% of you, are confident the information is out there. (you just can’t find it).
And that age old wives tale about only 10-20% of internet is indexed by search engines appears to be true, or at least globally believed.
I also ran across some statistics about how many search sessions you have in a month. A search session is defined as “a something” you are trying to find. Take the quiz below because I want to test this number… I’ll let you know how the poll comes out.
