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Today is BlogDay, the day set aside for celebrating blogs. (Although really, isn’t that every day?) From the site…
“BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest…This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.”
We here at Lijit love blogs of all kinds and encourage you to do your part by participating in BlogDay. Barney posted his contribution, Daniel gave his thoughts, and I wrote a little something for the event as well. If you have the opportunity today, try to read a blog that you normally wouldn’t. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller…It’s a big blog world out there and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, something may just pass you by.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2sjbZ2c1K0]
Our youngest Lijit team member is really enthusiastic about our release last week. Just wait till she sees the features coming out next week! 
(If the video doesn’t display for you, here’s the direct link.)
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It’s official. If you look for us here–
you’ll be able to pick us out from this list…
and easily put our wijit on your Typepad blog.
In addition, we are featured here:
It brings us much joy to know that Lijit is being accepted into the realm of Widget Galleries. (Now if they would only make us happier by changing their spelling to wijit!)
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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:
Tags: features, release announcements | View Comments
I’m tired of people seeing that I’ve been searched about “crack”
Mar 23rd
by Leslie Osborne in Community
I wrote a blog post a little while ago entitled “Audi S4s are like crack”. When searching me through Lijit for that post, people sometimes just type in “crack”…which means that “crack” then shows up as one of my popular searches, and on my stats page, and (if someone just did it and you happen to be there to see it) on the Lijit homepage. Since I’m not really a big fan of crack (the drug) and haven’t amassed a lot of interesting, searchable content related to it, I sometimes find all of that a little misleading, as well as ever so slightly embarrassing.
Figuring that some of you may have experienced this same phenomenon, we added a feature that allows you to filter the searches displayed about you. Just look for the “Filter displayed searches” link on your profile page (under the “Searched About” cloud) or at the bottom of the “Top 25 Searches” list on your stats page.
Enter the terms you no longer want to display and — shazam! — they’ll display no more. If you change your mind and want to see those searches again, simply remove the term from your list and they’ll pop right back into view. Easy as that.
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TechStars brings aspiring technology founders to Boulder, Colorado for an intensive three month period, provides seed funding, education, and connections, and will result in the formation of ten new companies during the summer of 2007.
Techstars gives driven people a way to make it happen! And we here at Lijit are nothing but driven. Lijit is a huge idea of re-building Internet Search from the ground up, starting with the data individuals forage on the Internet and the relationships that help shape that data into information. We released our first service about a month ago and it was a natural to try out on Techstars!
Using the Lijit Search Wijit on the TechStars website, you can search the knowledge base of all the Techstars Mentors at once. Not just their blogs, but their del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, and even others that influence their opinions.
Give it a try! Search on “Venture Funding”…something near and dear to an entrepreneur’s heart! See what the Techstars Mentors have said and bookmarked.
We think Techstars is awesome, and what could be better than searching for entrepreneurial subjects through entrepreneurial eyes!
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Thanks to Pete Cashmore over at Mashable for the writeup on Lijit. He says we’re “handy”, but we’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeve!
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Sure it’s cool for your search to cover not only your own content, but also that of folks in your network. Damn cool in fact. Which makes it frustrating that it’s so difficult to set up your network.
We hear you, and we feel it too.
For now, you can add other folks to your network by one of two ways:
- If they are a Lijit user, simply go to their profile page and click the “trust” button. (It’s in the block with their picture.)
- If not, click the “Add RSS Informer” button up by the Lijit logo. Then enter the URL of their RSS feed.
We’re working on what is (IMHO) the most obvious solution for a blog: tying your network to your blogroll. After all, blogroll links represent the largest open social network around.
Google Custom Search is cool. And it’s a natural step for Google to distribute their search technology (dare I say “longtail-ize”?) in the same way that they distributed their ad technology when they expanded Adwords (on their domain) into Adsense (on anyone’s page). So it was a natural fit for us to use it as the backend for our Lijit Personal Network Search, and we’ve been happy with the initial results.But it’s not perfect.
Ethan Zuckerman wrote about problems with Co-op search back in October, and Google quickly responded with a fix. However, we’re seeing a lot of Ethan’s problems here at Lijit as well. The problem is that if your desired search results would not normally fall in the top 1000 results of a normal Google search, they don’t get included in your results. For example, Brad Feld has written a ton about Microsoft in his blog at feld.com as can be seen in a typical site: Google search. However, when you use a Co-op search which includes feld.com/*, you don’t get any results fromthat domain. The problem seems to be that feld.com doesn’t make it into the top 1000 results for a normal search for ‘”microsoft”. In a similar vain, if you search me for “sex” you’ll get stuff from BoingBoing (a high PageRank site) but not my post “Attention is Meme Sex” like you might expect.*
So it seems that the fixes implemented for Ethan aren’t working across the board. But I am encouraged by Google’s response to Ethan and hope that they will eventually be able to solve our issues.
Tags: search, tech | View Comments
I have been doing A LOT of research with regards to Internet Search over the last couple weeks. There is an amazing amount of information available. One thing that becomes crystal clear is why Google is making giant piles of cash everyday..
The Global Market for Ad placement in Search is currently in excess of $17B annually. Wow, as a good friend once said, you know your market is correct when it ends in a B.
Statistically if you are a consumer you will give up really fast if you don’t find what you want, maybe a search query or two, and you almost never look at page 2 of your results.
If you are doing research for work, you typically will search for quite a while, often a half hour or more. And if you don’t find your information, Mr. Researcher, which happens the majority of time, over 50% of you, are confident the information is out there. (you just can’t find it).
And that age old wives tale about only 10-20% of internet is indexed by search engines appears to be true, or at least globally believed.
I also ran across some statistics about how many search sessions you have in a month. A search session is defined as “a something” you are trying to find. Take the quiz below because I want to test this number… I’ll let you know how the poll comes out.
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