Search-Powered Web Apps

If you do a Google search for “importance of metrics“, one of the results will be from the blog of my partner and CEO, Todd Vernon. It’s a post of his that got a little traction and earned some PageRank.But Todd has written a lot about metrics. And he reads blogs of trusted people who have written still more on the subject. Someone coming to his blog for the first time wouldn’t know about his other work, or that of his experts. They’ll be back to Google in a flash. The searcher missed out on that good stuff. And Todd missed out on a potential new reader. It’s bad all around and there was nothing Todd could do about it.

That is, until this weekend.

We just introduced Re-Search, a feature of the Lijit Wijit that showcases your content at just the moment when people are looking for it.

Here’s what it looks like on Todd’s blog.

We also include content from your bookmarks, or pages that you’ve linked to in your blog. That’s what you see here on Brad Feld’s blog after a search for “term sheets“.

Just a single click on your Wijit configuration page will turn it on. You can choose to have it across the top of your blog (as in the Feld example) or stacked on top of the wijit (like on Todd’s blog).

The simple truth is that many searchers come to your blog from search results. (As you can see on my Lijit stats page). Until now, there was no way to relevantly present your own content in the same way that an ad platform like AdSense would present someone else’s content. This problem was clearly explained in an excellent post by John Battelle.

I have a lot more plans for Re-Search, but this is a good start. Give it a try and let us know how your readers like it.

And if you don’t have a Wijit, you can always pick one up on the front page of Lijit.com.

Note: The Weekly Lijit stats email falsely reported that Feedburner was the most popular widget. This was true in our first pass but after subsequent filtering Google emerged as the top widget. Sorry this stat did not get changed in the email. -Stan
Newsweek declared 2007 to be “The Year of the Widget” For all this widget talk there are precious few numbers. What widgets are popular? What is the distribution within widget verticals?

Our Lijit spiders look at a lot of blogs as they assemble all the content for our user’s searches. In our last release we added some code to take a look at what widgets are running around out there in the wild blogosphere, and now we’ve got some numbers. Due to some technical problems we had to throw out a lot of data but we’ve got ten thousand blogs in this crawl. That’s a still a small sample so these numbers should be taken with a heaping serving of salt. However, even through all that sodium we can see some clear trends.

Our first graph shows the top 50 widgets, ordered by the percentage of blogs which contain at least one widget from the provider. We see the classic power-curve (aka long tail) shape, with Google the clear leader.

Next, check out the widget popularity by the type of widget, the “vertical”. We see that bloggers clearly want to know about their readers, even more than they want to monetize those readers. They are also very interested in knowing what other people are linking to them. “Ecosystem” refers to widgets that identify a blog as being part of a group, for cross promotional purposes and such.

Within each vertical we can examine the breakdown between the competing widget providers. Note that each pie graph represents the percentage widget distribution among all widgets from the vertical. Contrast this with the numbers below each chart which show the percentage widget distribution among all blogs which contain a widget from the vertical. This distinction is important because many blogs will use use multiple widgets of the same type. This is especially clear for advertising widgets where 90% of all blogs with ads use AdWords, yet the AdWords widget accounts for only 75% of all advertising widgets. The degree of overlap can be estimated by how far the percentage totals go over 100%. For example, we can see that 47% of Analytics widgets do not appear alone.

Analytics

google-analytics.com	3264	56.18%
sitemeter.com	1822	31.36%
statcounter.com	1317	22.67%
feedburner.com	1003	17.26%
quantserve.com	402	6.92%
hittail.com	136	2.34%
performancing.com	136	2.34%
103bees.com	107	1.84%
blogflux.com	82	1.41%
measuremap.com	81	1.39%
bravenet.com	78	1.34%
getclicky.com	68	1.17%
reinvigorate.net	49	0.84%
histats.com	44	0.76%
	8589	147.83%

Advertising

googlesyndication.com	2431	90.14%
blogads.com	428	15.87%
adbrite.com	142	5.27%
glam.com	88	3.26%
fmpub.net	61	2.26%
b5media.com	54	2.00%
doubleclick.net	47	1.74%
	3251	120.54%

Trackbacks

technorati.com	1690	92.00%
haloscan.com	249	13.55%
wholinked.com	44	2.40%
	1983	107.95%

Search

snap.com	528	48.26%
google.com	423	38.67%
lijit.com	119	10.88%
sphere.com	67	6.12%
eurekster.com	54	4.94%
	1191	108.87%

*The numbers for Lijit skew high as our search used Lijit users’ blogs as seeds to begin the crawl (Before we had to throw out most of the blog data as invalid.).

Notes and Conclusions

These statistics are based on a crawl of 8552 blogs done over April 11-15, 2007. This crawl was “centered” on blogs with the Lijit widget (or as we call it, Wijit), and expanded outwards by following the blogrolls. Due to some bugs in how we stored this data, we had to throw out a large number of blogs. These stats only include numbers which we are sure to be correct. This is our first time, after all! For this sample we take a wide definition of widgets, including non-visible widgets such as as Google Analytics. Also note that we do not include image-only widgets, this includes the Feedburner subscriber count badge and the LinkedIn badge. Also not included are “widgets” that are automatically added by a blogging platform, like those from Blogger or Typepad. Because our crawl expanded outwards by blogrolls, and because of the general disconnect between the traditional blogosphere and social networks, widgets from sites like MySpace are not included in these stats.

In the coming weeks we will crawl again and again and continue to iterate these stats. Watch this blog to for further updates.

Tonight we released new and exciting configuration options for the Lijit Search Wijit and search result displays. With regard to the Wijit, you can now easily change its width, display your content icons and search cloud, and add an “Add to Google” button (more on that later) without having to reinstall. Here’s what the new Wijit (with all options turned on) looks like on my blog:

Visit the “My Search Wijit” page to start configuring your Wijit now! (Note: If you have the old style Wijit, using the configurator will replace it with the new style Wijit. Nothing bad or scary, just something to be aware of.)I mentioned above an “Add to Google” button that is now available as an option to add to your Lijit Search Wijit. Offering this button allows people to add your Lijit search to their Google Personalized Homepage with just a couple clicks. It’s a great way for you and your readers to keep favorite searches at your fingertips!Aside from configuring your Wijit on the “My Search Wijit” page, you can now also specify how you want your Lijit search results to display. They can either display on lijit.com as they do today, or you can select from two new options — “On my blog (basic)” and “On my blog (advanced)”. The “On my blog (basic)” option displays results in a small box superimposed upon your blog. Here’s what that looks like on my blog:

The “On my blog (advanced)” option allows you to display Lijit search results on a page within your blog. The great thing about both of these options is that neither takes readers away from your blog to display search results, which many of you have told us is very important. We hope you enjoy using these two new search result display options and welcome any feedback you’d care to share with us about them.