We just launched a stats page on Lijit. Very cool. Now you can see how people are searching you, which of your content sources are being clicked on, who in your network is providing good results, and lots of other goodies.
For example, here’s my page
Looking closer, the first stat gives a view of how often I’m being searched
Next is a graph showing what and who (my content and my network) is being clicked on from my search engine: Posts from my blog, posts from someone else’s blog, pages from my delicious bookmarks, etc…
You see that posts from my blog (”blogs | wanderingstan”) are clicked the most, then some stories from the TalkOrigins archive, some posts from Read/Write web, some stories I’ve dugg, and so on.
Next is a graph showing the distribution just within my content
Again we see that my Blog is the most popular, with my delicious, digg, and StumbleUpon (that’s the “wanderingstan’s” one at the end!) accounts also serving up some clicked-on results.
We also give a listing of the most popular clicked-on results, and a more detailed account of top search terms used.
Another cool one to watch is the stats for the Ask the VC blog, you can see the stats here. For example, check out the range of blogs that are serving up results:
Check it out on your own search engine page. The results might surprise you!
Last week we released a new set of enhancements to Lijit, primarily focused on the signup process.
But there’s one feature that I’m particularly excited about but that isn’t immediately obvious: automatic blogroll crawling. What’s that you ask?
If you have a blog, it probably has a section where the you list other noteworthy blogs. These are blogs you read and basically find attention-worthy. Lijit can now automatically find this part of your blog and add all of those blogs to your Lijit search. And the Lijit server will check on your blog every day or so to see if you’ve made any changes–no need to configure things here every time you make a change.
Blogrolls form a huge implicit trust network, and no other service has really exploited them until now. Adding them to your network is just the first step, I’m also working on some blog authority algorithms that rely heavily on blogrolls. I’ll post some preliminary results soon.
Stan and I were having a chat with Tim Wolters the CTO of Collective Intellect yesterday. I have known Tim for 1000 years and he is a genuinely smart guy. As we talked I was explaining our market and it dawned on me (or maybe it was Stan) that we are the long-tail of Vertical Search..
Everyone knows vertical search (although not always by category). Vertical Search is best known by the names “Yahoo Local” or “WebMD” or other easily identifiably high level verticals. Vertical Search works really well, mostly because the search domain is constrained by a set of ‘editors’. It’s cool and works well because these editors figure out the good stuff and put it in there. Problem, Vertical Search around a single subject matter will only get to a certain level of specificity. If the Vertical itself can’t support an ad based business model on its own, then it just won’t happen. No revenue, no editors, no search.
Lijit is about enabling search for/on everyone, specifically publishers. As our publisher base grows we will be able to aggregate the best and brightest on an infinite number of vertical topics….essentially creating the long tail of Vertical Search.
How about the “Engineers that play Flamenco Guitar Search Engine” anyone ?
