Search-Powered Web Apps

After a lot of work, we are proud to introduce something new for our WordPress.org users. If you like the Lijit search and want it to be integrated on your site in a more, how shall we put it, hijacked fashion, then this plugin is for you.

As everyone knows, you can currently install the Lijit widget on your blog in the traditional, add-the-code-to-your-sidebar kind of way. But now, with this new Wordpress plugin, you can keep the current search bar you have on your WordPress blog, but have Lijit power the search results. It’s like magic.

It looks like a normal search bar, but when you do a search, BAM! Search results brought to you courtesy of Lijit.

Like any other Wordpress plugin, you can find the Lijit Search (version 1.0) in the plugin directory. Or HERE.

Once you download the widget, simply log into your WordPress dashboard, go to the plugin page and activate it. Upon activation, you get to choose whether you want to use your existing Lijit account or you can create a new one inside the WordPress admin console.

You can also choose between the classic widget install option OR hijack the existing WordPress search box and make it Lijit-enabled.

But wait! That’s not all. We’ve also included another super-cool feature…integrated statistics. You love the stats that Lijit gives and now you can see those from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard. Simply click on your Lijit stats and you’ll see all that detailed goodness, telling you exactly what you need in order to keep your readers happy.

Many of you asked for a better way to integrate Lijit search on your WordPress blog and here it is. With a cleaner and tighter feel, Lijit and Wordpress.org are playing even better together than ever.

***This plug-in is only available for those WordPress users with versions 2.3-2.6.***

We would like to thank the great team at Crowd Favorite for helping us to make this happen. And by all means, let us know what you think of the plugin. We think it rocks, but are more excited to hear your thoughts.

Happy hijacking!

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

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

The following is a guest post by Dave Ferro. He’s a director on our product team, an avid rugby player and blogs about his fly-fishing adventures here.

When I interviewed for the job at Lijit, I was asked if I read any blogs, and if I had my own blog. There were a handful of blogs that I read at the time, a couple centered around fly fishing, a weekly column from a sports writer from the bay area, and a few others from the business community that I would check into periodically. As far as writing a blog was concerned, I didn’t figure I had the time, nor would I have assumed that anyone would ever read it. I was told that writing my own blog was going to be a condition of employment; the logic being that to work for a company that provides utility for blog publishers, I should first walk a mile in their shoes. That made sense. Upon receiving the job offer, I went about creating my own blog.

As with many undertakings where one walks in blind, I learned things that I never would have thought of before. The first thing that I learned is that people who you don’t even know will read your blog from places as far away as India, Hong Kong, and Santiago. Even domestic locations like San Antonio and Topeka, where I have never been, and will likely never go.

The second thing I learned about blogging is that there is a veritable plethora of gadgets, widgets, feeds, and other utilities that a publisher can add to his site…the best of which being the Lijit Search Wijit. There are also about a hundred ad networks who will give you a little snippet of code that will place an ad on your site.

Sifting through these ad networks is somewhat of a daunting task. Each of these networks has more or less the same message, “Put our line of code in your site, and we’ll pay you. Not only that, but our black box is the best black box, so we will pay you more than anyone else will.” It all sounded good, so I applied to a few of the bigger names and even a couple of really obscure ones that sound like they are run out of someone’s garden shed.

My site was accepted immediately by one of the household names, and the ones whose websites would have looked lame in 1997. Strangely, my site was rejected by a few upper and middle tier networks, via an impersonal email. Others said that my site was under consideration, and that they would get back to me when they decided that they wanted to work with my site. I love open ended exchanges like this.

I found that once you are accepted by an ad network, you have entered a one-sided partnership. Good luck getting a real answer to a real question. Good luck figuring out why you made 25 cents per click on Tuesday and then 15 cents per click on Wednesday. Some will allow you to block any domains of advertisers that you don’t want to appear on your site, where others leave you with the option of displaying the ads they send you.

At the end of the day, it is your blog, and you have the opportunity to change anything you want. It seems that there is a lot of trial and error you will go through in order to find out what works best for you.

I’ve been at Lijit a few months now, and everything is starting to make more sense. Every product and messaging conversation we have revolves around what we can do to make it easier for publishers, and what we can do to create a better experience for our publishers and their readers. As a product guy, I get to work on features and products that provide utility and real value for our publisher partners. Walking through the trials and tribulations that publishers everywhere will face has given me a better perspective on how to do that.

At Lijit, we are constantly developing and testing new features for the product, the search results and the re-search box.

Recently, we have begun to explore the concept of including Flickr thumbnails within the search results themselves. Pretty cool idea, right?

What we cant come to a final decision on is exactly where the thumbnails should be placed. So, we are asking our users for feedback.

Here are the choices:

Here are the thumbnails on the LEFT (click the picture to expand):

Here are the thumbnails on the RIGHT (click the picture to expand):

And, here is a quick poll to help us figure this out. The cool thing about this quiz, is you can cut and paste it onto your blog, and share it with your friends. Check it out and thanks for the help!

Over the weekend, one of our favorite Lijit users, Fred Wilson, posted his desire to do a blog spring cleaning.

Of course, the first thing I did was rush over to Fred’s blog and see if Lijit had made the cut. Luckily, it appears that we are one of the chosen few.

Thinking that Fred made a good point about keeping a blog clean, I headed over to my blog at Learn To Duck and started whacking widgets.

Last.fm? Gone. Instant Message widget? Outta there.

After the third whacked widget, I began to think about 1) why people should keep Lijit on their blogs (other than its the coolest widget ever!) and 2) what value do widgets bring to a blog.

Widgets, by design, should provide three things:

1. No apparent slow down of the blog page itself;
2. Real utility to the readers of the blog;
3. Real utility to the publishers themselves.

So, how does Lijit stack up?

Page Load Speed:

I asked one of our developers what specifically do we do that ensures that Lijit doesn’t slow down a blog’s load. Andy explained that we cache the javascript for a two hour period, making the javascript call (which is the main culprit in page load slow down - watch the lower left of your browser, you can watch how long it takes widgets to load) much shorter. In addition, we will always display the latest widget to a user, and then cache the javascript in the background for the next user.

Not being technical, I am guessing that means we load more quickly because the site doesn’t have to go get the widget every single time someone comes to the page.

Reader Utility:

Why is Lijit better than standard site search or Google custom search? Two specific reasons:

1. We search the publisher’s entire social graph and trusted sources.
2. While Google tries to index everything, Lijit just indexes everything that is important to you.

So the likelihood a relevant result is returned through Lijit search should be higher than if the same search was done on any standard search engine.

Also, unlike most widgets, Lijit is built to keep users on your site. Most widgets are connected to a destination site and their sole purpose is to drive traffic to the destination site. Lijit just wants to search your stuff.

Publisher Value:

For a widget to earn the right to live on my blog, it must make me a better blogger. The stats that Lijit provides is a direct example of this. One stat that I use a lot is “Results that returned zero results.” If people are searching for topics, but not finding them, then I need to write about them.

Also, because Lijit is trusted network-based search, relevant content from my blog is surfaced on other blogs that include me in their network. Basically, I get more traffic the more people trust my content, because it appears more often in the network’s search results.

Finally, because more of my social content is exposed through Lijit search, readers are more engaged and consume more content across my site and my social graph.

I certainly can understand Fred’s desire to clean up his blog, and have echoed his efforts on my own blog. Frankly, I wish more people would periodically do a widget clean up and when the time comes to determine which widgets stay and which are round filed, ask yourself three questions:

1. Does this widget slow down my blog page load?
2. Does this widget provide real value to my readers?
3. Does the widget provide real value to me as a publisher?

Hopefully, the answer in Lijit’s case is a clear yes to all three.

I’m excited to announce an innovation on the Lijit customer service front. You might notice a shiny new badge in the sidebar of our blog here? (If you are reading our feed, simply click out for a second to behold the greatness of the badge!) From their site…

“Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers. Customers, employees, and companies are all welcome here. Nothing is hidden, and no one is censored. Join the conversation!”

I first heard of Get Satisfaction when their CEO Thor Muller installed the Lijit wijit on his blog. During my usual outreach, I started checking out what Thor was up to and discovered Get Satisfaction. I was so impressed with the idea behind GS (Open customer relations? A public space to have conversations with your users? Why hadn’t someone thought of this before?) that I immediately signed up for an account with Lijit. However, I never did much more with the account than upload our logo and establish myself as the company representative. I figured that other people would come and do the rest.

That was that. Until I found out that the nice Get Satisfaction folks were hosting a meetup at SXSW…and they were serving breakfast tacos. (That’s a picture of Lane Becker, the GS President standing by all the delicious tacos!) Besides the necessary hangover nutrition they provided, Lane, Thor and Amy also gave me lots of information about how to cultivate Lijit’s presence on GS. It turns out that I forgot to tell people about it. Whoops! Thanks to all at GS for helping out a newbie community gal.

And now, look at me! My how times have changed. When you click on the Get Satisfaction badge, it will take you straight to the Lijit account. I’ve started to add some of the questions that I frequently answer from users and hope to continue building it out over time. However, since the whole point of Get Satisfaction is about fostering the customer community, your input is most appreciated. Ask a question, report a problem or share an idea. I’m there and I’m listening. Don’t forget that you play a HUGE part in getting satisfaction out of this site.

One additional note: once you start digging into GS, you’ll realize that there are many other companies striving to open up the conversation. Some of my favorites in there are Timbuk2, Apple and other Boulder startups Socialthing!, Intense Debate, and Filtrbox. Sign up and start getting heard!