Search-Powered Web Apps

Here at Lijit, we love finding out about new blog tools that make it easier to discover great content. (Hey, it’s a big part of what we do!) We first met the folks from outbrain at SXSW in 2008, when both of our companies were helping with the b5 Blog Network Camp. Since then, we’ve both grown up a bit. It’s not unusual now to hear both Lijit and outbrain discussed as must-have tools for any blogger.

In the interest of research, I wanted to give outbrain a try on my work blog, I quit for Lijit. It really is a simple one-click install and only took me a couple of minutes to get it up on my blog. I love that I can now get instant feedback and, underneath my posts, I’m recommending other quality content for my visitors to read. For a free service, outbrain rocks. I’m looking forward to checking out the reports that outbrain provides and to find out even more about the people coming to my blog. Who doesn’t love stats?

If you’re interested in an easy blog enhancement, be sure to give outbrain a try. Their widget inherits the look and feel of your blog, making for a seamless integration that can only help your readers. We really like what outbrain is doing and think you will too!

You can read more about outbrain on their blog and follow them on Twitter.

I just checked my TripIt account and so far I have been traveling for 25% of 2009. That means, having just started June, that I have been gone from Boulder for more than a solid month. (Well, not a solid month, more like a total of a month worth of days, but I bet you get it.)

Which also means I get a lot of time to read. Lately, I have been reading a book called The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs. In the book, which is non-fiction, AJ reads the entire encyclopedia to become the smartest person in his family.

In many ways, I view Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (I mean BING!) similarly. They are out there attempting to catalog the worlds information so that when asked a question, they can provide you with THE one right answer.

Often, they do. But as time as passed and the information store has grown, context has been lost. When you do the search for “seal” what is returned? The animal? The singer?

Google hedges its bets by displaying images of both, but guesses the singer in the results…

There was a recent article in DM News that search queries of three words or less were down 3%, 5% and 1% respectively, but that searches of four to eight words had grown from 3% to 20%.

In short, searchers have learned that to get relevant results, you have to use more than three words.

My friend Kevin Lee of Did-It was quoted as saying:

“Longer queries are a sign of the searchers becoming more educated and savvy and essentially being trained by the fact that results for shorter queries tend to return less relevant results than longer searches.” (emphasis mine)

Frankly, while not surprising, that boggles my mind. Searchers have learned that the major search engines are inherently inefficient and ineffective at applying context to a search query. How is this progress?

That major search engines are relying on the searcher to provide the context via additional keywords in the query.  How does that create a better search experience?

Which, of course, brings us to Lijit.

Across our network approximately 75% of the searches are three words or less. Why is that?

Because we allow the publisher to provide the context. Their readers, by going to a trusted source first, already believe that the results that are returned will be contextual to the query. Therefore, they don’t need to use multiple word queries to return relevant results.

How do we know that this is the case?

1) On average, we get a higher click through rate on organic results than people using Google Custom Search.

2) On average, we get a higher click through rate on ads than the industry standard for text ads.

So what is better for publishers?

The “one right answer” approach that the major search engines take, or the “every publisher has a right answer” approach that we take?

I suppose that is up to the searcher.

But, I can guarantee it will take less keywords in the query to find the answer on a Lijit publisher.

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to speak at WordCamp Denver. What is WordCamp you ask?

Basically, WordCamp is a day (or two) long event where bloggers and developers (specifically Wordpress developers) get together to talk about all things Wordpress.

This was the first time that Denver has hosted a Wordcamp, and Crowd Favorite (the makers of our Wordpress widget) put it all together.

What a great show it was.

It was broken into two segments, the first, in the morning started as WordCamps usually do, with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, giving his “State of the Word” talk. He brought up all the interesting things that the Automattic (the team behind Wordpress) was working on, what the next release of Wordpress would have, and he talked about a couple new resources that were launching, Wordpress.tv and the Wordpress Handbook.

The morning included a panel on web design, with Kevin Menzie (Slice of Lime), Jeremy Harrington (crawlspace|media) and Brian Warren (Be Good, Not Bad). Jane Wells of Automattic talked about Open Source, and right before lunch, one of my favorites, Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger who spoke on how his company, Pet Holdings, focuses on the core aspects of their business by outsourcing all technical needs. And he did it without once showing a LOLCat.

In the afternoon, there were two tracks. A technical track and a blogger track. True to Alex King, the technical track was highly technical, with Jake Spurlock and Joe Scott coming in from Utah (Jake spoke on BuddyPress, which one day will be released! Joe spoke on XML-RPC, which might be one of the coolest things ever).

Over at the blogger track, there were a varied subject matter. Boulder’s Jim Turner was on a panel talking about making money blogging; Gil Awsakwa spoke on Media and Publishing, which was especially timely given the recent close of the Rocky Mountain News.

Jon Fox (another Boulderite) spoke about his company Intense Debate and how they are attacking the comment space.

Dave Moyer, an incredibly intelligent and successful kid (and by kid, I think he is 15 years old) spoke on Podcasting. Working at Bitwire, he has become quite the expert on the subject.

At the end of the day, I spoke about Measuring Online Influence, and tried to focus on the reasons why we blog. I have embedded my deck below:

All in all, WordCamp Denver was a great experience. After speaking out at Wordcamp Las Vegas, it was great to get to be involved in a WordCamp closer to home.

If you are interested in attending a WordCamp, check out the upcoming ones. I am speaking at Wordcamps in Chicago and DC, and may be at the ones in San Francisco and New Orleans.

We are excited about our newest offering for blog publishers: the ability to create and maintain your own Content Network. Many of our users were requesting some way to build topical communities that would promote their content and help to drive traffic to individual sites. We listened and now you can organize groups of bloggers that write about a common area of interest.

There are three Content Networks currently up and running: The Security Bloggers Network, The Venture Capital Bloggers Network, and The Cycling Bloggers Network. With the release of the Conent Networks, Lijit provides all the tools for you to easily create one of your own. Lijit will host the main site, aggregate all the RSS feeds from the individual bloggers, and allow your readers to search through the entire network of experts. Additionally, we give you the ability to monetize your network through display and search advertising.

The real beauty of the Content Network lies in the simple fact that by collecting similar content in one place, readers have an amazing way of searching across a number of different bloggers writing about the same thing. When you visit the Security Bloggers Network, you can do a search that will bring back results from all of the 200+ bloggers who are a part of that network. No one knows the industry better than those blogging about it and now, readers can benefit from all that expertise in one place.

You can read more and find out how to start your own Content Network here. We love hearing feedback and are proud to be able to empower bloggers to do even more!

This past Saturday, Lijit was proud to help sponsor the first-ever Chicks Who Click, a social media conference geared for women. More than fifty women (and a handful of men) gathered to talk about many different aspects of social media, including how to effectively use different tools to market your small business, how to create a consistent brand online, and how to balance your online activities with your offline life.

I was honored to speak on a panel titled “Your Social Media Toolbox”, with the amazing Wayne Sutton and the talented Lucretia Pruitt, both of whom know way more than I do and both of whom I’m sure will be installing Lijit any day now (wink, wink). Once I got going, I realized that I’ve really learned a lot in my two years at Lijit and with that in mind, there is still so much more to learn. Just over the course of our panel, I learned about some interesting new tools that look promising. I’ll be sure to share more details once I’ve tested them out myself.

It was lovely meeting so many different women, doing so many different things, that were able to come together to discuss something we all had in common. Whether it was a small business or a huge corporation, everyone seems to realize the importance of social media. The main challenges come from proving the value of it to those who don’t understand…ah yes, ROI.

Some of the businesses represented at the conference include:

The Wisdom Coach
Fresh Organic Office Delivery
BirdDog Press
Baby Candy
Little Alouette
Sama Baby
One2One Network
BumperTunes
Park City Mountain Resort
ZoomAlbum
Working Knowledge
Klein Buendel
Crocs
Embarq
Colorado Springs Health Partners
Beneficence
Synapse3Di
Local Matters

If I forgot someone, please let me know and I’ll be sure to add you to the list. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone!) Many thanks to the other sponsors, Kirtsy, Metzger, and Walmart and to the many women who shared their expertise. Chicks Who Click was a wonderful event and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year!

[Photo credit: Emily Lewin]

You would think, that with all the good things happening here at Lijit, we couldn’t want for anything more. While basically true (we’re healthy, have funding, and mostly like one another), there’s always room for dreaming. And after asking around the office, it turns out there a few things that Lijit wants for Christmas. File these under “publishers we want to be using our search” and enjoy the list!

Design*Sponge features the absolute best in home and product design, including product reviews, new designer profiles, trend forecasting, student design and global design shows. Lijit could help Design*Sponge by searching everything they’re doing so wonderfully on the web: their press and accolades, their Flickr photos and featured podcasts, each contributor’s content, and their newest video collaboration via YouTube with the New York Public Library. Not to mention, with design in mind, they can use our WordPress plugin and not change their current blog design and layout.

Alex, the author of Blogsessive, is “obsessed with blogging” and covers all the tips, plugins, themes, coding, etc. that goes along with blogging. His site is a mecca for the blogging expert to the first time blogger, however, the one missing tool he hasn’t featured or tried out is Lijit’s search. We see this as a holiday win-win, because his reader base will learn another Lijit blogging tool while he could increase his reader’s engagement, pageviews and searches done on his blog.

If Geeks are Sexy, then those of us working at Lijit have got it going on. However, we would argue that using Lijit makes you even sexier. We couldn’t agree more with the blog’s mission to provide “up to the minute tech news, reviews, and tutorials.” So why not include Lijit’s search and help out your readership of “IT professionals and computer enthusiasts”? Don’t they deserve a good search option as well? Plus, we know that Yan who runs the blog just loves our “Too Lijit to Quit” style.

Ken Rockwell is a go-to source for reviews on photographic equipment and advice. While Ken is currently using Google’s site search, we’d really love to see him using Lijit, if only to see the valuable information contained in his network! In many parts of his blog, Ken says that he supports his family with his site’s revenue, so he might be interested in ways to increase his ad revenue (Lijit can do that!) and since his site winds up as a destination for many Google searches, we also know he’d see the real value keeping searchers on his site longer (Lijit can do that, too!).

The Talking Points Memo is high on the list of favorite political blogs amongst Lijit employees and has organically grown over the past eight years into something of a blog network. It’s also the epicenter for a lot of original reporting that pushes the mainstream news cycle. All that political coverage demands a better way of searching through it, in order to receive trusted and relevant results. Memo for the New Year, Talking Points: Install Lijit.

We wish Political Wire was Lijit because many in the office consider the site’s author to be something of a political guru. Taegan brings current, up-to-date information to readers on the hour and the site’s breaking news aggregator provides quick insight about what’s going on in the world of politics. Also, with a blogroll like the one on Political Wire, doing a Lijit search of their trusted network would bring back a wealth of information. Here in the office, we’re hoping Taegan will vote for a change…in his blog’s search tool.

We enjoy a good laugh around the office and Stuff White People Like delivers the goods every time. Besides being funny, it’s true. Unfortunately, this blog is hosted on a wordpress.com site, which means that they can’t use Lijit. So, I guess what we really want for Christmas is the ability for bloggers to use our search on wordpress.com sites. (Hear that Automattic, you can make our holiday wishes come true!)

From all of us here, we hope you have a wonderful holiday celebration and that you find all you’re searching for! Also, if you see yourself listed on our wish list, please understand that we mean it as the highest form of flattery and are keeping our fingers crossed that you might be susceptible to a little holiday guilt. Hey, a startup can dream, right?

This is another in our series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. Mike Pritchard is bestowing the honor on us this week and if you like what he has to say, you can find more of his writing (and photography) on his blog.

So, what is a day in the life of Lijit like? My name is Mike “Pip” Pritchard, I’m the tech lead for the ad server team, and if you’re been following the blog here, you’ll realize that we’ve been pretty busy. Crazy busy, in fact, but we’re excited that we’re working on projects that are helping grow Lijit and create revenue for both Lijit and our publishers. And we have some great projects in the pipeline that you’ll get to hear about as we roll them out!

I’ve been at Lijit since October and I came to Lijit from a non-traditional background for a web startup. You see, I’ve come from a strong AI background and have spent most of my career building robots for either the DoD or NASA! Weird, but true.

I’ve built tiny robots, flying robots, crawling robots, industrial robots. So how did I end up at Lijit and why? Well, I love working in the AI field. The more we learn about biological intelligence the more it seems to be incredibly parallel in nature, the human brain seems to be a vast collection of independently functioning systems (structures of neural networks) working together in a fairly chaotic way, with the emergent behavior being intelligence, or at least what we think is intelligence. Almost like if we were to throw billions of computers together all connected to each other something would emerge from the chaos, something very unexpected. Sound familiar?

Well, that is for the future, but for today humanity has created this vast connected mass (or mess) of information and computers that we’re only beginning to organize. Maybe we’re not organizing it, but its organizing itself. Just like many complex biological systems we see in nature, it is perhaps a self-organizing system and it seems to be organizing itself around structures like social networks.

This, of course, is why Lijit is so important. Lijit is the natural evolution of this process, and allows us to search through these social networks in a more meaningful and useful way. This is why its an exciting time, and Lijit is a cool place to be…

(Photo used with CC license courtesy of: Dan Coulter)

I’m Dave Ferro, the Director of Ad Serving here at Lijit Networks, and today’s guest author for the Lijit blog. Today, Lijit is releasing the latest version of its ad network. The theme of this release is to offer greater value and control for our publishers. In our first release, we provided publishers with the ability to opt-in to our ad network and earn money from the largely overlooked ad inventory of search results pages. It was a solid first step in our product evolution, and now we are taking a second step toward our goal of providing publishers with a transparent, flexible, and manageable search ad offering.

Publishers can now set their own pricing for search ads that advertisers target for their search results pages. Publishers who choose to do so can also sell their own search ad inventory through a link that they can email to advertisers. Because many publishers will prefer the leave the business of selling ad space to us, we will fill all available inventories with ads that we sell directly to advertisers. As always, we will fill the remaining unsold inventory with ads from third party networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo!.

We have also placed a link in the search results pages of our publishers that will bring an advertiser to the ad creation workflow. For publishers who have opted-in, the links will bring the advertiser to a workflow specifically for their publications. If a publisher has yet to opt-in to the Lijit ad network, the advertiser will be taken to the generic campaign workflow.

We are also making it easier for advertisers to target their ads to match the intent stream of the reader. Advertisers now have the ability to search for individual publishers who have opted into the ad network, and to review statistics and pricing information before creating a campaign for a specific publisher’s search results pages. For those advertisers who target individual publishers, they will pay the price set by the publisher. Advertisers also now have the ability to upload lists of keywords and keyword phrases to target their campaigns.

In the coming weeks and months, we will release features and offerings to improve our ad network for both publishers and advertisers. Continuing to add value for our publisher and advertiser partners by providing flexibility, transparency, and control are the fundamental principles behind our decision tree. I look forward to future guest posts where I can announce what we will have rolled out in our next releases.

You can find out more details on our Advertising Network page.

Another in our series of employee guest posts, this time around we’re honored to have Ryan Peterson contributing. He is a software engineer here at Lijit (although he prefers pimp), considers himself a tea connoisseur and can be found at his blog.


On January 21st, 2008, Microsoft announced its upcoming version of Internet Explorer (IE8) would not render Web pages in a standards-compliant way by default, and for the browser to do so, Web sites would need to include a special “meta” tag in its header.

Later, after tremendous outcry, they reversed their position and announced IE8 would render in a standards-compliant way by default.

This blog post is not about browsers or IE8–but an interweb phenomena which I have dubbed “blog events”. These announcements by Microsoft are perfect examples.

Defining “Blog Events”

Despite the likely fact that an academic or established Social Media personality has already observed and named this phenomenon something much more eloquent, I call Blog Events

“Events, announcements, or news that motivates large numbers of individuals from various social media demographics, online communities, or groups to blog and/or comment on the event of interest.”

When Microsoft made their announcements, Web developers and designers had various things to say. Blogs, comments, and forums filled with chatter regarding the issue. People were motivated to discuss the event. Even I rushed to write a blog post on the issue on previous employer’s blog, but another developer beat me to the punch by about 2 minutes, posting his blog post first. My blog post was naturally wittier and more fun to read, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog post.




Other Blog Events

Some other “blog events” I have observed are the recent Motrin advertising debacle, Magpie’s attempt at a Twitter Ad Network, and pretty much any Apple product announcements.

What are some other “blog events” you have noticed or observed, in your online communities or elsewhere?




photo used via Creative Commons courtesy of: davepatten

Last week, the Defrag conference came to Denver. In its second year, Defrag is unlike the standard conferences Tara and I have attended on behalf of Lijit over the past year or so.

Defrag’s tag line “Accelerating the aha moment,” is rather appropriate. I liken it to a dinner where the participants are all highly educated and someone like Professor William Duggan, Columbia Business School and author of Strategic Intuition speaks on where the origins of innovation are in the brain.

Or, there is a rousing discussion around the aggregation and dissemination of content around the web with T.A. McCann, Gist; Tom Keller, IntenseDebate; Daniel Ha, Disqus; Avinoam Rubenstain, my6sense.

Imagine listening to Charlene Li discuss how to harness the implicit value of the social graph?

But, more importantly, because of the small size, interaction increases. I sat down with Howard Lindzon and was able to talk about Lijit and StockTwits at length, which just is so difficult to do at larger conferences.

It was great to have a conference of the quality of Defrag locally, and I am excited to see what Eric brings to Denver next year!