Search-Powered Web Apps

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 entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Lijit publishers, company. 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.