Search-Powered Web Apps

This week Cuil launched. We pay attention to everyone in the search space even though we really don’t consider most companies competitors. Lijit builds search based applications that install on publishers sites. We selected that mission very carefully because publishers are first and foremost our customer. We don’t operate a destination search site but rather empower the sites we reside on and the publishers we serve. Lijit has all the parts of a search company, we have lots of computers crawling and indexing the web and our secret sauce is the way we bring a level of trust to results and an alternate methodology to ranking pages.

In the world of destination search, Google pretty much owns the show. It’s not impossible for that to change as witnessed by Google’s own rise. The latest contender in destination search is Cuil. I tried a few searches and had really good results. Others, not so much.

I had to chuckle at the Cuil results for a search for “Lijit”.

Cuil seems to lead with the Wikipedia definition of things (as do many other destination search engines – much to Google’s consternation). In our case the top result is the Wikipedia page Stan made about us a long time ago. (An aside: Now, I’m pretty sure we are the most knowledgeable people about “lijit” but Wikipedia outwardly dogs our entry as being a “conflict of interest” regarding this subject matter. It seems to me that requiring people less knowledgeable to be involved is a conflict of interest with regards to Wikipedia).

Anyway, where I was going here are the images. I kind of like the tabloid presentation of things but where did these images come from?

Apparently the best match images of “Lijit” is of a tire company logo, a boat of some type, a “buy now” button (our service is free), and my favorite a guy sniffing glue.

Search is hard..

Micah and I attended BlogHer this past weekend, held in San Francisco. This was my third BlogHer event and they’ve all been unique. With a thousand attendees, the BlogHer organizers did a fantastic job of logistically insuring there was an ample amount of activities scheduled in order to have lots of opportunities to meet other bloggers and learn from them. As a representative of Lijit, it was helpful knowing some bloggers going into the event. On top of that, Lijit was mentioned on two different panels as a useful tool for bloggers. (Yippie!) And to round out our good Lijit vibes, when I told people where I worked, I was greeted with looks of recognition.

From attending a session on why mommyblogging is a radical act (shhhh…it’s because women are telling the truth) to a session on how to pursue your passion, there were intelligent and dedicated bloggers all over. I know that some women were concerned with the high school/sorority aspect of the conference, but for me, it was all about thanking the publishers who are currently using Lijit and following up with those who have yet to install. Building relationships is a HUGE part of my job and BlogHer presents a wonderful space to do just that.

I would never have started blogging if it weren’t for taking a job with Lijit and I love that because we make a blogging tool, it’s a no-brainer for us to have a presence there. (I’m thinking that next year, we might even have to get a booth!) It’s amazing how being social, striking up conversations, and meeting people can take it right out of you. I never realize how hard I work at a conference until I come home, sleep-deprived and with a three-inch stack of business cards.

Micah wrote a post about his experiences as one of the few BlogHims in attendance, while I posted some personal highlights of the trip over here.

In order to share the link love, here are some of the blog publishers that I ran into at the conference who are currently using Lijit:

Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come
califmom
Everyday Goddess
Greeblemonkey
electromute
Send Chocolate
Whiskey In My Sippy Cup
Dirt to Dish
PHAT Mommy
Average Jane
Pause
This Mama Cooks! On a Diet
Scheiss Weekly
Greek Tragedy
Table for Five
contentious
CityMama
Queen of Spain
Mommy Needs Coffee
SecondHand Karl
MOMocrats
A Mommy Story
POP! PR Jots
Her Media

And then, if that isn’t already a great list, we’ve also had some blog publishers sign up as a result of Lijit being at BlogHer. We’d like to welcome these new users…

bad mom
Elkit in Wonderland
Oh, The Joys
happykatie
Alex Year Two
Glossed Over
Moms In The Right

Thanks to all those who gave us great feedback and shared their thoughts about Lijit. We loved having the chance to listen to what you had to say and appreciate your continued support!

I was going to entitle this post “When the Mouse Speaks…” but, by now, we all realize that Chris Brogan is no mouse.

Last week, a day before I left for BlogHer, I was at Techstars listening to the teams’ 45 day demos (quick analysis: 2-3 interesting ideas, no great presenters, a lot of work ahead in a short period of time). As I left to grab a quick dinner with the mentors and the teams, a direct message from Chris buzzed on my phone.

Thinking he was talking about the ads that appear in our search results, and that he had a valid question, I responded with:

To which Chris responded:

Confused, and thinking that the normal ads on our results pages were wonky on his site, I responded with:

(side note: not sure why all the DMs are marked as Chris. I hope you can follow the thread…)

And then a couple of hours later (closer to 1am MST), I got home to a message from Aaron Brazell that Chris had written a post on Lijit and ads, and I should check it out.

Exhausted after a long day, I clicked on the link, and as soon as I saw the picture on the left, smacked myself in the head.

“He was talking about Re-Search!” <SMACK>

Re-search is an interesting feature of Lijit, which about 3/4 of our users have turned on.

To digress a bit, there are four major features of Lijit that we feel help the publisher (and ultimately the reader). They are:

1. The search itself. The ability to get a more focused and related search on a blog is of high value to both readers and publishers. For example, a search on my blog, Learn To Duck for “billie” (my dog’s name) will turn up posts, pictures and videos done by me AND people I trust. Which is a different tact than Google, where they attempt to index everything (we index only the things that are important to you), and we assume everything is trusted (Google assumes everything is spam).
2. The popular search cloud. The inclusion of the search cloud seems to drive searches. How many searches? It seems to drive 3x-10x of the searches depending on placement and use. The more the readers use the search cloud, then the more publisher content they discover.
3. Search statistics. While many publishers have Google Analytics, they have little insight into the search behavior of their readers. Lijit provides an easy way to to see a snapshot of the previous 30 days of search activity.
4. Re-Search. Re-search is a box that opens up with your widget or across the top of your site (if you know what you are doing, I believe you can put it in different places) that takes the query just done on a search engine (the box only appears on the approximately 30% of visitors that come from search engines to our publishers) and does a “re-search” on your publication.

Sounds good right?

Except that Re-search only appears when a search is done from a search engine. How many publishers do a search on Google for their own publication and then click through to their site? Probably none.

So, when a publisher does that, they are (sometimes) surprised to see the Re-Search box. As Chris was.

So, rightfully so, Chris wrote a post. And the comments were quite interesting. some positive, some negative. Mack Collier, a social media expert, decided to uninstall and write a blog post about why he was (unfortunately) not going to reinstall.

Todd Vernon, who normally I try to keep away from commenting on posts, jumped into the fray as I left for BlogHer. He listened to what the commenters, and Chris were discussing, and about half way through the day, pulled together a group of folks at Lijit, and decided that 1) we need to do a better job of calling Re-Search out in our signup flow (making it a requirement in the new redesign), and 2) to turn off ads within the Re-Search box, given that according to our users, they are intrusive, and 3) make the ads part of a opt-in ad strategy.

At Lijit, we are in a constant state of learning.

We are trying things, and testing things, and breaking things and failing at things. What makes the process truly rewarding, is that our publishers join us in the process, and they let us know what they think about the things we are doing.

Sometimes our lessons come from the whisper of a mouse, and sometimes they come from the roar of a lion.

So, thank you Chris and Mack, your feedback is invaluable.  After all, we will never be what we want to be if we dont stay in a constant state of learning.

This post and pictures accompanying it are courtesy of Colleen, who holds the title of “executive assistant”, but should be called “the great one who keeps our office together”.

A couple of weeks ago, our CEO, Todd, and his wife Lura hosted a summer BBQ for the Lijit crew. It was a great time for everyone to socialize with each other outside of the office. The evening was filled with good company, good food, hilarious conversations and a bit of weak badminton playing. (I know, we can blame the dogs for stealing the birdies, but the only one who really brought their A game was Dan…who is some sort of alternative sports guru and brings his own racket with him to picnics.)

When the Lijit crew is outside of the office and not talking shop, their personalities and creative sides shine through in many ways. Below are photo highlights from the evening:

There weren’t enough badminton rackets to go around, so Manny decided to improvise and use Todd’s security sign. I believe it had further reach than your average racket.

Who knew Todd was a grilling machine?

Leslie sporting her salsa competition trophy

Jeff’s son, who lost a tooth on a toasted marshmallow

How could I not mention Manny’s Sprite-dwarfing muscles?

Badminton action shots

All in all, everyone had a great time and we’re looking forward to next year. Look out Dan…I hear people will be practicing up for a badminton rematch.

This post is written by Lijit’s COO, Walter Knapp, who loves data points of any kind. And bikes.

Every once in a while things just seem to make sense. In any business, when things are really working well, it becomes almost easy. Your target market is well-defined and your offering/value-proposition resonates with your customers. You have a great team that’s inspired, smart, and works hard. Customers, shareholders, and employees are happy. Life is good.

Problem is…that seldom happens.

From the start, we’ve been working at Lijit to be an advocate for the online publisher. We started with bloggers and blogging networks. More recently, it’s expanded to commercial publishers. The great part is that across this scope, nearly every constituency is interested in varying degrees of the same (3) things: more readers, more reader engagement, and more page views.

In our role as a publisher advocate, we recognized these three pillars early on. More recently, we’ve begun to do some detailed analysis on the data we capture and relate back to our publisher community through their Lijit statistics.

A couple of interesting data points:

• On average, 30% of all our publishers’ traffic comes to their site through a horizontal search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). The most common behavior is to read the page and then click the back-button (check your exit path if you disagree). Lijit has a unique functionality in our Re-Search box that shows the reader other, related content from the publisher’s site and network, resulting in more engagement and more page views.

  

• If a publisher installs the Lijit search widget, leveraging our search-cloud functionality, they generate an average of 2.5x more searches than a standard search box. We’ve seen this behavior as high as 10x in certain categories of content. Readers click on content in the search results more than 25% of the time a search is performed so this additional search behavior can have a dramatic effect in the number of page views and additional reader engagement.
• We share with the owner of the individual publication all sorts of search behavior. We give the publisher “intent” behavior in the form of search queries and resulting click data. We even point out when searches return no results, therefore giving more detailed insight into the expectations people have when reading a site, something no other service provides.

At Lijit, we just decided from day one to build a company that has the customer in our DNA. Is that so wrong?

Photo credit: chocolate monster mel

Yesterday Yahoo! announced their BOSS platform. BOSS is an API into their search infrastructure that lets application builders build a new unique search experience on top of all the Yahoo indexed content. It makes a lot of sense, as search is not an easy thing to do, especially when your corpus of content is the entire world. For fun I lined up Google, Yahoo, Me.dium, and Hakia.. The latter two are utilizing the BOSS platform. Finally, I threw in my Lijit search operated off Lijit’s own crawling and indexing infrastructure.

It’s actually pretty interesting how similar Google and Yahoo results are for this vast sample set of 1 search for “paris catacombs”.

Obviously Lijit returns much different results because Lijit isn’t constrained by the “one right answer” problem. The Lijit results are centric to me (the publisher) and my experiences, as if you had asked me about the Paris Catacombs. The right answer is what “I know” about the paris catacombs, the corpus is my experiences – my writings, my bookmarks, my photos, my videos and stuff my friends know. Of course, Lijit is not a destination search site so we live in a different space then the others. They have the problem of delivering one right answer, we have the difficulty of returning thousands.

The takeaway for me is Yahoo! BOSS and Google CSE are both great platforms to build innovative search applications on top of. However, at the end of the day, innovation on top will rule that day or other everyone will just return the same results formatted differently. Look forward to seeing more in this space from everyone.

During the Facebook frenzy of the last year or so I have heard over and over that Facebook will kill LinkedIn, or LinkedIn is playing catch-up to Facebook, or some derivative of that theme. This is of course based on the meteoric rise of Facebook’s user base, even within the 40 something segment where I reside. While I understand the thought process of this, I simply don’t get the utility out of Facebook that I get out of LinkedIn. Now, one could counter that LinkedIn isn’t any fun, which is true – but it is useful, specially finding people with specific expertise in something I need.

But if I take a step back for a minute, LinkedIn could be so much cooler.

Let’s take a real world example. Two years ago my daughter was doing a report on 3D rendering. I thought it would be cool to find out what rendering platforms existed and what people were using out there. It dawned on me to go to LinkedIn and look for people that worked at Pixar in the off chance I may know someone. It ended up that I found a guy that worked with a friend of mine from the simulation group back at NASA. This guy was a technical director on the movie Ratatouiie that was then in production. Using LinkedIn and my friend I was able to get a conference call scheduled and my daughter and I spent a hour learning about the profession, the tools, etc. All very cool, a total LinkedIn success story.

After that call it dawned on me how cool would it be if I could search for information though that person. Surely Pixar Guy had bookmarks in del.icio.us, perhaps things he has written that appear online, maybe even a blog. We were lucky that Pixar Guy would take an hour out of their busy day to take a call with a teenager and her dad, but for everyone person like that there are probably a 100 that would not. If I could leverage that person’s knowledge without having to bother them how cool would that be. Of course, Lijit is in the search space focused on finding information through people and their connections so the leap was easy for me to make.

Yesterday, LinkedIn announced Searchable Groups Directory and this morning I checked out their blog to see what it was all about.

LinkedIn now allows self forming professional groups to create a tighter Link between each other. For instance one group in their screen image is the CIO forum. Imagine being able to search (for information) through some of the world’s top CIO’s. That would be an interesting perspective on enterprise software for sure.

So, for fun I decided to take a look what an integration of LinkedIn and Lijit may look like. The results were pretty cool.

Click on my hacked version of my LinkedIn page and then enter a search term in the new “Search My Content” field. I listed myself on LinkedIn as a startup CEO and CTO so a natural search term to enter maybe something like “Angel Financing“.

This could be a whole new layer of engagement within LinkedIn that provides even more use to me. In fact, based on the information that I can glean it would seem I would be a lot more likely to use the LinkedIn Answers because I drilled down on useful information..

Now image this capability tied to the LinkedIn Searchable Groups feature they just released. Essentially this would become the world’s largest vertical search engine generator. How cool is that?