Search-Powered Web Apps

In addition to having our first birthday and closing on a round of funding, we got mentions in two places that we hold close to our hearts…

and

Yippie! To read what they had to say, check out TechCrunch and Mashable . We appreciate the attention and hope to soon introduce more newsworthy features! Keep your eyes open…

It’s true. We have been running hard since January signing up publishers left and right. In the process we have run across some really interesting people and their stuff. For instance did you know there was an expert out there on pencils? We didn’t until they became Lijit. How about a lady that reviews public restrooms? Or writes about narcolepsy? Or…throws down on sports announcers? You guessed it, they are all now Lijit.

All this success made it clear to us this spring we needed to find some venture money to help us grow this thing. Strictly speaking Lijit was already growing itself, and if we didn’t get out in front of it we were going to be in trouble.

After talking to a lot of really good guys out there we decided on Boulder Ventures. They really understood the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish here and will be an awesome addition to the Lijit Board of Directors.

As a result of the funding, we are looking for some more people to augment the team (we’ll double it). This Thursday at 4pm we are having a little open house here at the office and across the hall in our temporary expansion space. Come by and have a beer. If you are a Database expert or a RockStar developer we may try to hire you on the spot, so be warned.

To our publishers, thanks for all your support over the last 6 months, we could not have done it without you!

Last week we celebrated Lijit’s 1st birthday. We’ve done so much in the past year (and don’t worry, I won’t wax poetic and try to catalog it all here)…it’s just really fantastic to sit quietly and reflect on everything we’ve accomplished. Definitely a lot of good stuff.

To celebrate, we had a little birthday party. A great time was had by all, but especially by Derek, Colleen, and Tara.

Happy birthday, Lijit. Here’s wishing us many more fantastic years to come!

In April we published the first-ever widget statistics. Comscore recently followed suit and released their own set of widget metrix. There are large differences in what we are attempting to measure. They are looking at unique visitors, here at Lijit we are looking at publisher adoption. They are looking at social networks, we are looking at blogs. They consider only Flash widgets, we also look at JavaScript.

These statistics are based on a crawl of 29,139 blogs during the week of June 5th. Our definition of “widget” is any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.

• “Functionality” includes analytics widgets. These add functionality for the blogger but are invisible to visitors.
• “Regularly occurring” excludes widgets embedded in posts, such as YouTube and Dailymotion videos. (We do collect statistics on these, however. The final chart of this post shows the results.) Widgets that occur on all posts, such as the “Digg this” widget, are included.
• “Voluntarily” excludes widgets added by the blog hosting platform. We are only interested in widgets that bloggers make an effort to install.
• Image-based badges, such as FeedBurner subscriber counts, are not counted. HTML forms, such as the original Google search boxes, are also not counted. We may include support for these in the future.

As before, this crawl was “centered” on blogs with our Lijit widget. Or as we call it, the Wijit. Our crawler then expanded outwards by following blogrolls. This may give a bias to the overall results. However comparing these results to our smaller sample set in April, this effect seems to be minimal.

Overall Popularity

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

The overall percentages are lower than in our last report. My best guess is that this is due to the larger scope of this crawl. As we venture futher from Lijit users, we encounter more un-widgeted blogs.

PayPerPost.com does not officially appear in this list. However, some detective work showed that they wrap all of their widget placements behind a Tinyurl address. Tinyurl.com doesn’t provide a widget of their own, but is merely a service redirect to other URLs. It is not clear why PayPerPost would pursue this strategy other than to obscure the face that a particular blog is a member of the PayPerPost service. PayPerPost tracking widgets appear on 1% of all blogs.

Popularity by Type

Many widgets provide similar functionality. The following graph shows the popularity of each type of widget.

As we saw last time, analytics widgets are the most popular with advertising in second place. Bloggers clearly want to know about their readers, even more than they want to monetize those readers! The “Social Network” type is dominated by MyBlogLog. Similarly, Twitter is the only entrant in the “Microblogging” category.

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 widget objects 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 at least one AdWords widget, yet the AdWords widget accounts for only 75% of all advertising widgets found. The degree of overlap can be estimated by how far the percentage totals go over 100%. For example, we can see that 43% of analytics widgets do not appear alone.

Analytics

Advertising

Search

Trackbacks

Video

Video widgets do not strictly fall into our definition because they are not permanent fixtures on a blog like, for example, a blogroll widget. However, we did capture statistics on the relative popularity of video widgets appearing on the front page of blogs we examined. YouTube is the clear winner here. This is interesting considering that YouTube did not show up at all in Comscore’s Widget Metrix.

Action Photos

As you can see here, Lijit uses only the latest in technology when crawling blogs and compiling widget statistics.

Stay tuned and subscribe for the next round of widget stats coming soon.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

You may have noticed that for a little while today all of the users and content sources in Lijit had a new name — and the exact same name, for that matter: “2Speed’s Blog | Road Cycling at YourCycling.com”. Please know that this did not adversely affect how searches worked or the results that were returned in any way, but it certainly did look strange. It was just an (unfortunately very obvious obvious) “oops” we committed while working on something else.We’re going to go put ourselves in timeout now, think about what we’ve done, and make sure we don’t ever do it again. Sorry for any confusion we may have caused you!

Excuse the cheesy post title (you’ll find out why it’s cheesy later), but we just launched some great new features this week and want to tell you a little bit about them.But we’re not going to tell you about them here. Oh no. You’re going to have to take a field trip out to Tara’s blog to read more about the “surprising” (oh, there it is again) features we released.

Another big change not discussed in Tara’s post, but that is certainly worth mentioning, is that we no longer require users to provide their Google account credentials in order to create a search engine.

Do you hear the angels singing too? Yes - this is truly wonderful news for current and future Lijit users alike. Not only does it remove that stomach-churning step from the sign up process, it also allows us to far more easily create and maintain users’ search engines over the long run. Hip-hip-hooray!We hope you enjoy the release. If there are any features you’d like to see included in Lijit’s future releases, be sure to let us know!