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.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.