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 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.

The following is a guest post from our Systems Architect, Zach, who loved the fact that he could incorporate his book report into this.

I am about 100 pages into a 512 page book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in history–Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond. The author attempts to explain the history of humankind for the last 13,000 years, with a brief synopsis of everything before that, including the spread of pre-human species and the rise of homo sapiens. A major question that Diamond poses is, “Why did the winners in history win?” Diamond concludes that geographic and resource advantages determined the winners. It’s a thought-provoking book, and it has made me think about Lijit’s development i the world of blogging.

Diamond says that in order for humans to advance and create anything approaching a modern society, they must first get beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. In a hunter-gatherer society, all able-bodied members of the tribe must contribute by hunting game or gathering wild plants for food, or discovering new lands to explore. Such societies are too small to support politics, and few people have time to specialize, invent or innovate. Lijit might have had a period like this, when the few founding members each had to contribute, hunting down desks and servers, gathering scraps of code to build up a search engine, and, of course, discovering new bloggers to build a healthy community.

Once a society gets beyond hunting and gathering and into an agricultural lifestyle, the doors swing open for advancement. Food surpluses build up, and political organization emerges. Societies stratify into specialists, such as farmers to generate food, trade people to develop and manufacture new technologies, warriors to protect and expand territory, and priests and chiefs to organize society. One could draw a comparison to Lijit today. Although we’re all wearing many hats, roles are forming within the company. Some of us get to concentrate on cultivating the software, others on taming the hardware. Some of us are the scribes and philosophers who commune with our publishers, and preach their wants and needs to the rest of us.

But some places that are just fine for hunters and gatherers are unable to support agriculture. And some places that might have once supported agriculture were degraded by hunter-gatherers before agriculture could take hold. For instance, hunters got so good at killing mammoths that early humans can probably take most of the credit for their extinction. Could Lijit suffer the same fate?

Australia is a good example of a place that might have supported agriculture, but failed to because of early human influence. Australia once had many large animals including giant versions of wombats, monotremes, tazmanian devils, and, my favorite, a 400 lb. kangaroo. These species disappeared shortly after the arrival of humans, leaving them without any animals to domesticate, and Diamond says this may explain why Australia’s native people never developed agriculture. They didn’t have the option.

[Let's just think about that for a moment. That is, the notion that you could domesticate a 400 lb. kangaroo. Can you imagine? I bet you could churn a lot of butter with one of those. Their legs must have been incredibly powerful. And think of how you could deploy a 400 lb. kangaroo in a conquest scenario. If you could hang on, it would be an awesome elevated platform for throwing stuff at people, and a tricky bouncing target for bows and arrows. Would you want to see your enemy coming at you on one of those things? I sure wouldn't! Better yet, you could hide your troops in their pouches for a classic Trojan Kangaroo attack. "Pay no mind," they'd say as you stealthily approached. "It's just another herd of 400 lb. kangaroos." Then, wham! Out you'd come like some giant kangaroo spawn to take what is rightfully yours.]

Anyway, fast forward about 50,000 years to our current situation at Lijit. Do we have the resources we need to fully develop into a mature and sophisticated engine of culture and innovation? Can we thrive without harming the very land and resources that give us strength? Is my analogy going anywhere, and if so, could I please get to the point?

In a word, yes. Lijit is poised for success because we have developed cooperative advantage for ourselves and our publishers. Our mission is to empower our publishers to expose more relevant content, to understand their audience, and to attract more readers. Publishers are our rich landscape and resources. We know they give us strength only so long as we give them strength in kind. And giving our publishers that advantage is something we are very skilled at.

I am just getting into this book, just as I am very new to Lijit. But I am excited to see how they both turn out.

Photo credits: swisscan and amalthya

This guest post was written by Dan Jones, our VP of Engineering Chief Architect and one of the original “fantastic” four to start Lijit.

Lijit celebrated its second birthday on Saturday, and like a proud parent, it seemed only appropriate to force people to look at pictures and listen to endless stories about our wonderful child. Actually, if you think in terms of “internet years”, Lijit is probably more like a 30 year old than a child. But I’ll still take this opportunity to get a little nostalgic and talk about how things have changed over the past 2 years.

The idea…

Lijit was founded on the idea that we were going to do something cool around trust networks. This was an area of expertise of our original CTO, Stan James, and was the basis of his Master’s thesis–the Outfoxed browser plug-in. However, like most startups, the original idea changed along the way. After a few months of building the service, a slightly different idea began to emerge which involved creating trust networks for publishers (bloggers) and making those networks searchable. Along the way we have continued to refine this concept but the core idea is to create search based applications that can make publishers better.

The name…

The company was originally incorporated as Outfoxed Corporation, named after the browser plug-in that Stan created. However, it was decided early on that we needed a new name that was fresh, hip, and available (sounds like we were looking for a relationship). Anyone who has ever tried to come up with a name that is available as both a .com and .net domain knows that this is a hard and frustrating process. All the cool names you come up with are taken, and you quickly digress to considering silly names that have marginal relevance to what you actually do.

Our group was no different, and we spent several weeks thinking of names and promptly rejecting them. This was all supposed to culminate with a meeting at the Old Louisville Inn, with a notebook containing several pages of potential names, where we all voted for our favorites. Fortunately no consensus was reached because shortly thereafter, Leslie had a flash of brilliance while in Las Vegas, and came up with Lijit. It was the first name that everyone seemed to like and it didn’t take long before we were officially Lijit.

The office…

For the first couple of weeks of Lijit’s existence, we met in Todd’s basement, hatching plans, and figuring out what needed to be purchased to actually move into an office. Todd found some office space in Louisville that was a good deal and had nice views of the mountains. We moved in and decked out the office with cool Ikea furniture and an old foosball table that Stan bought on craigslist, and hunkered down to build a kick-ass service. Then last summer, with the continued addition of new people, we outgrew the Louisville office and needed more space.

Sing the following to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies:

Well the next thing you know Lijit needs some air…

The investors said Todd move away from there…

Downtown Boulder is the place you oughta be,

So they loaded up a truck and they moved to Walnut Street…

Boulder, that is…

Coffee shops…

VC’s downstairs.

Todd, Stan and Colleen found a great office and had it built out with all the standard high tech startup amenities (cool colors and cubes, brick wall with skylights, umbrellas to keep the developers from getting sunburned under the skylights, a new foosball table and a couple of game consoles–and of course, Rockband). Boulder is a really cool place to work. It’s a great town in a beautiful location, with lots of places to eat, etc. But even better, there is a very tangible tech/startup energy here that I don’t think you’ll find elsewhere in Colorado.

The infrastructure…

One of the tricks to starting an internet based company is figuring out how to scale your infrastructure. It is usually not too difficult to set up a few web servers and a database in a hosting facility to get you going. We started out with 3 web servers and a couple of database servers in a half rack with me acting (and I mean that literally) as the system and database administrator. However, the challenge is figuring out how and when you need to buy lots more hardware and hire professionals to manage it so that you can scale to the next level.

We were very lucky to attract two of the best Systems and Network guys we know (Mike and Zach) to build out our infrastructure. Mike wrote a great post about it, so I won’t go into details here. Suffice it to say that they have built some cool stuff that will allow us to continue to scale incrementally as we grow.

The people…

I saved this one for last, because I truly believe that it is the people that make Lijit special. Lijit has grown over the past few years and we have managed to attract and hire a lot of sharp people that work well together. But while the number of employees has changed, I think that the culture has been a constant. It’s a culture that promotes doing a great job that you can be proud of and having fun doing it. And one that values the individual and the contribution that they make to the success of the company as a whole. I hope this never changes.

As you can see, Lijit has gone through many changes over the course of its young life and we continue to grow and mature as we go. Fortunately, we have a great group of people that have the experience and the willingness to adapt to the changes required at each stage of this growth. There are still lots of challenges that we will face, and lots of things that we would like to do better and faster, but I really believe that with the team of dedicated people we have, we will be up for meeting these challenges at each step along the way.

So thanks for sitting through the tales of a doting parent. I hope I didn’t bore you too much (and I hope you’re not thinking “Man, that is an ugly baby…”). It’s been a fun ride and I’m looking forward to the next 2 years to see where we go from here.

One of my favorite bloggers (who still *ahem* hasnt installed Lijit on his blog) is Loic Le Meur the founder of Seesmic. As Loic built Seesmic, a short form video startup, he recorded a video blog about the struggles and triumps of building a startup. Every day.

That’s transparency.

At Lijit, we embrace transparency. Like so many other companies, we understand that the increased access that users have to a company’s founders and employees (for example, you can follow the following members of Lijit on Twitter:

• Todd, CEO
• Tara, Community Catalyst
• Micah, VP, Business Development
• Leslie, Senior Director of Product and Operations
• Daniel, Integration Engineer
• Mike, Designer
• and many others…including Lijit itself (yes the company itself tweets!)

But that is just one form of transparency. That is the transparency that speaks to what we are doing in building the product.

As publisher advocates, its important that we explain to publishers exactly what installing Lijit provides them in terms of functionality, and, more importantly, how we get that info, and what we do with the data.

We, of course, have a privacy policy and terms of use that outline specifically what we do with data.

As a Lijit publisher, you know that we provide a wonderful suite of stats around searches and searcher behavior. To provide those stats, we collect the following pieces of data around the search itself, the publisher, and the behavior associated with the query:

USER BEHAVIOR:

• Wijit views
• Wijit tag cloud clicks (side note: if you dont use the search cloud, you are missing out on 3-5x the total number of searches you could be getting. Im just saying…)
• Wijit searches
• Searches on a users profile page
• Search paging
• Search result clicks
• Site/result clicked
• Re-Search (side note: Yeah, me again. If you arent using this feature, you are almost suggesting to your readers to click the back button once they get to your site from a search engine. You like giving traffic back to the search engines do you? I didnt think so.)
• Re-Search result clicks
• Site visitor behavior across installed publishers
• Search(terms, clicks) behavior across installed publishers

PUBLISHER DATA:

• Account Demographic Info
• “Blacklist terms” - publisher selected “negative” terms
• Wijit data (is it installed? Its style, etc.)
• GEO data (collected through a provider)
• Trust and content relationships (content sources, blogroll, mybloglog, tags, etc.)

All of these data points are shown in our stats package, which a publisher can make public or keep private. For example, Brad Feld opens his stats to the public.

At Lijit, transparency is not a word we just throw around.

For us, our singlar belief in providing a service that helps publishers be better publishers means that there are no secrets. We gain nothing if we dont view our relationship to our publishers as a partnership. So, ask us, you might be surprised at the answer.

(As an example of this openness, I have started to leave my email address: micah [at] lijit [dot] com and my cell phone number (720) 231-7120 on FriendFeed and other places. Have a question? Call me. Drop me a line. I will always be open to helping and telling you how I will dominate the sushi eating contest.)

Another in a series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. This time, Ningsheng Liu explains to us his interpretation of the word Lijit. As someone who is not a native English speaker, he does a great job. And yes, it is (unofficially) Ningsheng week around here.

Obviously, ‘Lijit’ is not officially an English word and naturally there is no dictionary meaning. Otherwise, my folks in China would not have asked me, “What does Lijit mean?” They are all quite capable of using dictionaries.

Do I know the answer? No and yes.

No, I don’t know what ‘Lijit’ means from a linguistic perspective. I didn’t even bother to ask my colleagues. As a name, it should be a noun but most people pronounce it li`jit, putting the accent on the second syllable. I wondered how it should be pronounced in the context of “Do you Lijit?” But it’s not important. Who cares how ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Google’ are pronounced in the context of “Do you Yahoo?” or “Do you Google?”

If I tell my folks in China, “I don’t know what Lijit means”, they would be very disappointed. In fact, a word that is not included in the dictionaries does not necessarily mean it has no meaning. Yes, I have learned the true meaning of Lijit in the past two months.

To the users of the widget, Lijit allows them to easily create their own search engine that searches their blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll and more. With the Lijit search application installed on publishers’ blogs, readers can search all of the blogger’s content. In turn, Lijit provides users detailed statistics about those searches, so they can better understand and serve their reader community.

To investors, Lijit has a proved management team, a clear vision of business direction, an organic growth trend and a believable shot at ROI. They generally believe great people at Lijit working in a large and underserved market will discover and develop the products and services needed to be successful.

To competitors, Lijit cannot be overlooked at any point of time. Lijit is still very small but it is very strong. Lijit does not provide all the needs in the market sector but it provides unique services for what it does. Lijit is almost always a step ahead although its step is not very big.

To employees, Lijit is a family in which they spend a significant portion of their lifetime. They care about each other and learn from each other. While they may not come in with smiling faces every single morning, they do leave with smiling ones every single evening. The employees want to grow, in terms of personal and professional development, as Lijit grows.

To other people who currently do not know of Lijit today, they will learn about it very soon if they blog. Hopefully, Lijit (as a word and a service) will soon be as popular as Yahoo and Google.

Do you Lijit?

Photo credit: jovike

Ningsheng Liu (pictured above with Derek and a Lijit shot glass) is one of the newer faces you’ll see around the Lijit offices. He’s only in the office a few times a week, so when he comes in, it’s like seeing a long-lost friend…that you’ve only just met and don’t know very well. In the process of composing this post, I was able to find out that besides reading, Ningsheng also enjoys taking long walks through Cherry Creek State Park and traveling back to China to visit his family. Let’s hear what else the man has to say for himself…

• What is your Lijit contribution?

I am Database Architect at Lijit, responsible for data modeling, database design and database maintenance, in addition to participating in database application development. I am hoping that I can apply my knowledge and 15 years of experience in data and database to daily work to make Lijit application backend healthier in terms of performance, scalability, stability, and maintainability.

• What is your least favorite sound and why?

A few days ago when I was working in my study at home, all six smoke detectors suddenly fired up, almost at the same time. I was completely terrified, running from the upstairs to the basement and the basement to the upstairs, trying to figure out what was going on. I knew people outside would hear it and I just didn’t want somebody else to call 911. After making certain there was no noticeable smoke and any danger, the first thing I wanted to do was shut down the sound by disconnecting the power, but unfortunately I couldn’t, since I had unsaved work on my computers. Guess what? The only thing I could do was physically disconnect the smoke detectors, one by one. Finally, it all stopped and my small world was back to normal. I then realized that I had never really appreciated the normal quietness we get every day. I don’t want to hear that sound again ever.

• What is your favorite word and why?

I am pretty sure ‘lijit’ is not officially an English word, at least one I cannot find in a dictionary for now. That’s fine because ‘google’ is not either. At the time I’m writing this, spellcheck keeps complaining about ‘google’ as well as ‘lijit’. I know I can let spellcheck keep silent on ‘lijit’, but I would like to see the day that ‘lijit’ is officially a word and no longer a problem with spellcheck. Is that possible? Certainly. How soon can it happen? Well, it depends…we need to work harder and smarter.

• What is a profession, other than your own, that you would like to attempt and why?

I taught for a number of years before becoming an IT professional. I enjoyed teaching as that is one of a few ways we can influence people, especially younger generations, for their future lives and careers.

• Something you’re guilty of…

Every time I drive to work, I see people driving from an opposite direction and wonder how nice if all of us could work around our neighborhood. On the one hand, I burned 4 gallons of gasoline for a round trip, contributing to the lack of resources we have been experiencing globally. On the other hand, I produced carbon dioxide for every mile I have driven, contributing to global warming.

We’re excited to have Ningsheng on the Lijit team, even if we only get to see him every now and again. On an interesting side note, Ningsheng mentioned that he had a ping-pong table at home. He went on to tell me that his family only played on it for a month after they bought it…twelve years ago. Perhaps Ningsheng will want to dust off that table and donate it to the Lijit offices?

The most common question I get (well, after “Have you ever heard the MC Hammer song? Really? You have?”) is “Isnt Lijit just a search tool?”

I always reply the same, “No, we are a publisher advocate.”

Which is always greeted with one of three responses: 1) a look of bewilderment; 2) a look of amusement; or 3) a look of agreement.

Perhaps the strangest response I get is: “Why?”

For Lijit, the answer is simple. Because our entire existence is predicated on publishers. Not our business model mind you (although thats part of it) but our core value.

Our belief about publisher widgets is that there are two types: Widgets that exist to make publishers better publishers and seek to develop a true partnership and widgets that provide some value extension to the publisher.

The first type are publisher advocates, they have to improve the entire experience, both for the publisher and the reader.

The second type either is successful only on a high traffic publisher, or only for one consistuency, the publisher or the reader.

Our guiding principle when we add features to Lijit is simple: “Are We Being Publisher Advocates?”

In other words, does this feature make a publisher a better publisher by providing better service or increased engagement to their readers?

This also limits our focus to three areas:

1. Content Discovery / Reader Engagement

By indexing all of a publisher’s social content and trusted sources, Lijit allows content that may have been buried in a general search engine search to bubble to the top. Why? Well, we only index the things that are important to you; general search engines index everything. So, our base value proposition is that a publisher’s readers should find everything that a publisher trusts and wishes to expose.

In addition, when a reader comes from a general search engine, our “Re-Search” box proves additional implicit white-labeled results that tend to have a relatively high click through rate, effectively keeping a reader on the publisher’s site versus clicking the back button to the search engine.

Our stats also provide a variety of information for a publisher including results that returned zero results, providing a clue as to what readers are looking for from the publisher, potentially helping to inspire future posts or articles.

2. Optimization of Monetization

Publisher monetization is a noisy, competitive field, and currently we are loathe to produce a sub-standard ad experience for publishers. We cannot just be Yet Another Google Adsense Clone. We have to be better.

Lijit has to create an experience where publishers are optimizing revenue from an under-monetized section of a publication, namely the search results.

Everyone knows that search can be monetized effectively, but we believe because the results driven through Lijit are more contextual and relevant, the resulting revenue should be higher for the publisher. So, we are spending a lot of time developing an effective user interface and experience. Its hard and takes a long time, and we are close.

Besides search results, there are two immediate things that occur when using Lijit search. Your current social content gets better promotion increasing your overall pageviews, driving additional revenue now.

3. Cross Promotional Traffic

This is really effective if a publisher has multiple blogs or a blog network. With Lijit a publisher can use a high volume publication to help drive traffic horizontally to lower traffic blogs through cross-promotion in the search results. On average, our blog networks find that almost 30% of the results clicked in a search result are to another network blog, rather than the originating publication.

Each of these three functions: Content Discovery/Reader Engagement, Optimization of Monetization and Cross Promotional Traffic are all examples of how we feel that we are being publisher advocates, helping publishers be better publishers and helping them serve their readers.

After all, at Lijit we know one thing to be an absolute truth:

If publishers didnt provide social content or trusted sources, our results pages would be empty.

Chicago. The Windy City.

I was under the impression that the nickname came from the weather, but according to Wikipedia, it may also come from the fact that politics is a sport in Chicago, and that there are a large number of windbag politicians that reside there.

So, I am going to join the windbags and speak at the TechCocktail CONFERENCE:

May 29, 2008 - 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST
Kasbeer Hall - Loyola University
Water Tower Campus
25 E. Pearson Street
Chicago, Illinois 60611

My topic? “SEO Has Grown Up: My Quest to be The #1 Douchebag on Google.”

I plan to discuss how SEO has moved past the standard blocking and tackling of on-page content, clean code and relevant links. Personal or corporate brand has become so interwoven into online reputation, that companies can no longer avoid branding as part of an SEO strategy.

Interesting? I hope so. Interested? Register here.

And, hopefully, I wont be adding to Chicago’s nickname much. (Although how cool would it be to say you saw a douchebag be a total windbag in the Windy City?)

I’ve already mentioned the awesome tech community that we are a part of here in the Front Range. At a Blogger Meetup last year in Denver, I met Rob McNealy, the man behind Startup Story Radio.

Last week, Rob stopped by the Lijit office to interview Todd Vernon, our CEO and master storyteller. The podcast interview makes for an interesting listen. I love hearing Todd tell the Lijit story, especially when he does so with a head cold. Check it out to hear Todd’s side of things and his predictions for the future of our company.

(Hint: Things are looking good….)