We had a release yesterday in which we changed the look of Lijit a bit. Our home page has been redesigned to help give readers a better sense of what we do. Plus, we’d received feedback from people that they weren’t sure where to sign up for a new account. We just can’t have that. Ta-da…new, improved and still featuring our favorite Lijit green…
Another feature that we had a lot of users asking for was integration with Facebook. Okay, okay, we hear you. Now you can add your Facebook profile under the “my content” section of your Lijit account and we will magically place a wijit on your facebook profile page as well.
And finally, we had many user requests for the “retro” design of our original wijit. What our users want, they get. So we’re proud to offer two different wijit designs to choose from. When you go to configure your search wijit, you’ll see a drop-down menu near the top. From there you can choose the “big rounded” wijit or the “slim rectangular” wijit, which looks like this…
If you’re in the mood for a sleeker, old school wijit, it’s all yours. Another successful release comes to a close with more features, upgrades, bells and whistles that you asked for. We have lots more that we can’t wait to share and welcome your comments to help us shape the future of our service.
It’s been an awesome week here at Lijit. We celebrated our first birthday, closed $3.3M in Series B funding, and got written up in TechCrunch and Mashable. But could we stop there? No! We decided to thoroughly cap off the week and get a jump-start on July by releasing some new features and performance enhancements.
Do some of the things people have searched you about make you want to blush? Try our new naughty word filter. From your Profile page, click the link beneath your Popular Searches cloud to “Filter displayed searches”. With a simple click on the “Enable naughty word filter” checkbox, embarrassing searches — both past and future — magically disappear.
Wish you could have a screen name that was different than the username you log in with? You can now! Visit your Account page and fill in the Screen Name field. Easy as that.
Ever wonder where a search result listed on your Content or Network tabs came from? Wonder no more. We’ve enhanced the information that displays to the left of each search result to show how that result is connected to the person you’re searching. (Hover your mouse over the items in the left-hand column of your search result page to display the connection.)
Had you noticed that Lijit was getting a little slow? To fix this, we found some jet packs and strapped them to the servers. Well, no, not really, but we did release several fantastic performance enhancements. We hope you notice — and thoroughly enjoy — that Lijit is now sleeker and faster than ever!
As always, if you have questions or comments about any of the features we released or ideas for new features you’d like to see, please tell us!
Excuse the cheesy post title (you’ll find out why it’s cheesy later), but we just launched some great new features this week and want to tell you a little bit about them.But we’re not going to tell you about them here. Oh no. You’re going to have to take a field trip out to Tara’s blog to read more about the “surprising” (oh, there it is again) features we released.
Another big change not discussed in Tara’s post, but that is certainly worth mentioning, is that we no longer require users to provide their Google account credentials in order to create a search engine.
Do you hear the angels singing too? Yes - this is truly wonderful news for current and future Lijit users alike. Not only does it remove that stomach-churning step from the sign up process, it also allows us to far more easily create and maintain users’ search engines over the long run. Hip-hip-hooray!We hope you enjoy the release. If there are any features you’d like to see included in Lijit’s future releases, be sure to let us know!
Last night we pushed our latest release, Mountain Sun, into production. (Mountain Sun is a great eatery in Boulder, Colorado, btw. If you ever find yourself in the Boulder area, you should check it out.) The Mountain Sun release contained a hodgepodge of things – some small enhancements, some bug fixes, and a couple new features.
The first new feature is that we’re now showing the “My Blog” tab (along with the existing My Content, My Network, and Web tabs) for searches done from www.lijit.com. Previously, we were only showing the My Blog tab when a search was performed from a blog. We decided to change our minds about that rule… because we can…and now it’s “My Blog” tabs for everybody! (Well, at least for the everybodies who have a blog associated with their account in Lijit. If you don’t have a blog, we won’t show that tab.) This change allows searchers to benefit from all of your goodness, regardless of from where they search you.
The second new feature is that we’ve added Re-Search information to your stats page. (We launched the Re-Search feature in our last release.) If you have Re-Search enabled, you’ll see its stats displayed in the summary section at the top of the stats page and we’ll stack it on top of regular searches in your Number of Searches bar graph. If you don’t have Re-Search enabled, we still show you the stats just so you can see what you (or, technically, the people who arrive at your blog from a search) are missing!
And don’t forget, we always love to hear from you. If you have feedback about these new features or any other features we’ve released, send it to us!
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:
Visit the “My Search Wijit” page to start configuring your Wijit now! (Note: If you have the old style Wijit, using the configurator will replace it with the new style Wijit. Nothing bad or scary, just something to be aware of.)I mentioned above an “Add to Google” button that is now available as an option to add to your Lijit Search Wijit. Offering this button allows people to add your Lijit search to their Google Personalized Homepage with just a couple clicks. It’s a great way for you and your readers to keep favorite searches at your fingertips!Aside from configuring your Wijit on the “My Search Wijit” page, you can now also specify how you want your Lijit search results to display. They can either display on lijit.com as they do today, or you can select from two new options — “On my blog (basic)” and “On my blog (advanced)”. The “On my blog (basic)” option displays results in a small box superimposed upon your blog. Here’s what that looks like on my blog:
The “On my blog (advanced)” option allows you to display Lijit search results on a page within your blog. The great thing about both of these options is that neither takes readers away from your blog to display search results, which many of you have told us is very important. We hope you enjoy using these two new search result display options and welcome any feedback you’d care to share with us about them.
In honor of the first day of spring, we decided to clean house at Lijit — out with the old logo, site, and Wijit designs, in with the new. We think this has given Lijit a more open, roomy, and serene feeling, which we really like and hope you will too. We’d love to hear what you have to say about our new look, so feel free to add a comment and let us know how it strikes you.
As part of this change we’ve also made a new Wijit design available:
It’s very simple and clean — all of the same tasty Lijit search functionality without the clutter. If you’d like to swap out your old Lijit Search Wijit for the new one, just visit the Wijit page and go back through the install process.Finally, I’d like to introduce you to two new characters on the Lijit site, to whom we affectionately refer as “Crazy Head Girl” and “Serene Egghead Man”. (Yes, we know we need better names for them.)
Serene Egghead Man is our new default no-picture icon, so you’ll see him wherever we have no alternate picture to display. As for Crazy Head Girl, she’s currently only found on our logged out homepage, but we hope to cleverly incorporate her into other parts of the site, and maybe even the Wijit (gasp!), in the future.
Now it’s even easier to modify your network! In last night’s update we added the ability to modify your network without leaving the blog you are on. If you are a Lijit user and you visit a blog that displays our search capability, now our Wijit adapts and lets you add the person to your network! If you’re on your own blog, you can immediately jump to your stats page, and if that person is already in your network, then it will tell you.
We just launched a stats page on Lijit. Very cool. Now you can see how people are searching you, which of your content sources are being clicked on, who in your network is providing good results, and lots of other goodies.
For example, here’s my page
Looking closer, the first stat gives a view of how often I’m being searched
Next is a graph showing what and who (my content and my network) is being clicked on from my search engine: Posts from my blog, posts from someone else’s blog, pages from my delicious bookmarks, etc…
You see that posts from my blog (”blogs | wanderingstan”) are clicked the most, then some stories from the TalkOrigins archive, some posts from Read/Write web, some stories I’ve dugg, and so on.
Next is a graph showing the distribution just within my content
Again we see that my Blog is the most popular, with my delicious, digg, and StumbleUpon (that’s the “wanderingstan’s” one at the end!) accounts also serving up some clicked-on results.
We also give a listing of the most popular clicked-on results, and a more detailed account of top search terms used.
Another cool one to watch is the stats for the Ask the VC blog, you can see the stats here. For example, check out the range of blogs that are serving up results:
Check it out on your own search engine page. The results might surprise you!
What would it be like if you could search “through” a person?
Last night Lijit released our first version of Personal Network Search. We have been heads down for a month or so on a really cool strategy to make people, their online identities, and the people they know vertically searchable. It’s an amazingly powerful concept. In the following weeks we will review more about this strategy but for now you can try the concept right here on my blog.
In fact anyone can try it on their Blog if they have a Lijit account. First run our identity wizard to grab your other online personas and map them into Lijit, then turn on your Personal Network Search functionality from your Profile page.
Thanks to a cool Typepad integration you can one-click your search Wijit onto your blog..
Give it a try and shot me some feedback.. Interesting things to “Search My World” for that demonstrate the power here…
Search “me” for “tivo”
This results in a combination of bookmarks about Tivo that I have made in del.icio.us as well a entries from my blog that talk about Tivo’s.. Also mixed in there will be some hits of PVRBlog that I read on a regular basis..
Search for “Niel SAP”
I read Niels Blog Parallax and he is the most knowledgable person I know on SAP.
Search for “term sheet”
Returns a wealth of information from multiple sources close to me on building Term Sheets for startups..
Today we pushed out a few changes in our “Testarossa” release. The biggest one is the “Add other identities” page where you can link to your accounts on other services like Delicious, YouTube, and Flickr. Any content that you create on these other services will count as coming from you. In Lijit-land, this means that you not only trust this content, you are this content!
Congrats to Andy for the cool AJAX-y interface and Derek for figuring out how to mesh with all these other services.
