Search-Powered Web Apps

This is another in our continuing series of guest posts by Lijit employees. Jacqueline is a community catalyst who spends her days taking care of Lijit publishers and in her spare time, enjoys exploring what Colorado has to offer. She was kind enough to share her thoughts about a recent trip to Denver.**

A few weeks ago, Lijit went on a field trip (sans parental permission slips) to the Democratic National Convention. It was an opportunity to witness history in the making in Denver. History always transcends politics and we saw that firsthand. Generational and racial barriers fell to the side as people from all walks of life embraced themes portrayed throughout Obama’s campaign. It was inspiring to see.

A call to action within the Democratic Party was interpreted through an artistic lens at the “Manifest Hope Gallery.” The gallery was comprised of contemporary political art, with its star, none other than Senator Obama. Talented artists from around the country used their art as a voice in order to amplify and motivate the grassroots movement surrounding the Obama campaign. Progressive politics through art captured the core values of Obama’s campaign, “hope, progress, change, unity, and patriotism.” The art displayed has made a huge impact in the visibility of the Obama campaign.

Walking around the gallery provided a personal sense of patriotism. Collectively and individually each piece of art addressed the current challenges and struggles felt under the Bush administration, and how Senator Obama will bring about the change that is so desperately needed. The artwork captured strength, power, and intelligence as the brush, paint, and artist worked together to give Senator Obama a place on the canvas. Portrayed as an iconic symbol, it truly is an Obama nation.

As the end of the day drew near and things ended, the Lijit team headed home. Lijit has publishers from all different walks of life with different political beliefs. Today, we were lucky enough to meet and speak with some of our publishers. They expressed their opinion of the candidates and the issues important to them in this election. Separated from Denver by thirty miles, Lijit felt extremely fortunate to be a part of the Democratic National Convention and represent not blue or red but, our own color, Lijit green.

**As with all of our guest posts, Jacqueline’s views are her own and do not necessarily represent those of the entire company.

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!

Here it is, the third day of a three day weekend and (perhaps because it is Monday), I have Lijit on the brain. This holiday weekend has been a good one for us, with new publishers such as Chris Pirillo, Duncan Riley and Dave Zatz (who runs a great TiVo blog. Todd, you can thank us later) giving us a whirl.

Side note: For all you aspiring business development people out there, getting someone to try your stuff is the easy part. Making sure they are happy with the product and feature set is the hard part. We like the hard part at Lijit.

We even got mentioned in a couple of blog posts, with a real comprehensive review from Louis Gray himself.

And, in all the flurry of activity, one line of Louis’ post seemed to sit in my brain:

[...] essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web.

One of the hottest spaces online right now is the social aggregator space, with companies like FriendFeed, Socialthing, Profilactic and others taking the lion’s share of the buzz.

Friendfeed, who is the clear leader offers a multitude of ways to slice and dice the aggregated social data from yourself and your friends, including a search function that can drill down by service or relationship (friend or yourself).

But still, its like drinking from a firehose.

I get an RSS feed of the ~150 people’s feeds (plus my own) that I monitor. Even with Twitter “hidden,” I still get an average of 500 updates to that RSS feed daily.

Frankly, a firehose of data.

And I love it. I am a consumer of data. Robert Scoble (another Lijit user) is THE example of a person that can drink from a firehose of data and pull out the pieces that are inherently interesting, not only to him, but to others as well.

Which brings us to Louis’ comment.

What if instead of passively looking for information (which is what watching FriendFeed is really doing), I want to know everything that one person (and his trusted sources) has written about a topic? Enter Lijit.

Lijit is a social aggregator like FriendFeed and the rest, we just dont open that data to the end user. Rather, we say, “Know someone you trust? Come to them with a search query, and we will find everything they and their trusted sources have blogged, photographed, videoed, or said about the topic and return only those results to you.”

In essence, what Lijit does is drink from the firehose for you, and return just a glass of your favorite information to you. (Yes, with no backwash.)

Want an example? OK, here we go…

I want to know about Link Baiting. I know Micah (being that I am Micah) was a pretty good SEO back in the day, so I go to LearnToDuck (my favorite blog of course) and using Lijit, do a search for “link baiting.”

Turns out that I havent written much about linkbaiting, only one article which is really not that interesting, so I click on the My Network tab…and what do I find? Gobs of results from people Micah trusts:

And for comparison, here is the same search done in FriendFeed:

At the end of the day, FriendFeed is a wonderful tool that I use daily.  I find it feature full and informative, especially when I want to understand what is going on right now.

But, when I want to see the photos that Robert took on his last trip to Yosemite, or that one YouTube video Chris made a few weeks back, or posts from people that Micah trusts around linkbaiting, Lijit is really the best utility out there.

The punchline? Well, it depends on what you are attempting to do, but my general rule is:

When I want to drink from the social media fire hose RIGHT NOW, FriendFeed is where it is at; and when I want to sip [find relevant data] from the social media fire hose, I find Lijit is the right utility for the job.

And, yes, I cant wait until we launch FriendFeed support (coming soon!) so you can get the best of both worlds…

Recently, one of our publishers reached out to us to get our take on third party cookies. They were considering removing our widget due to the fact that we set a cookie when a browser views our widget. This brings up the debate over security and safety when it comes to third party cookies, and cookies in general. We responded to the post in the comments, but I wanted to elaborate on that a bit more.

Why Lijit uses cookies:

We use cookies to not only track whether someone is a Lijit user (allowing them to login etc), but also to allow us to match up a blog/widget visitor to any searches they may perform through our widget. This helps us to provide valuable metrics to our publishers in the form of stats, which in turn allows publishers to give their readers better content.
Generally,cookies allow us to gather better data about our users. Due to the ever rising pattern of “cookie blocking”, either by browsers, firewalls, security software,or explicitly by users, we have had to find other ways to continue gathering statistics. This means we have to use traffic pattern matching techniques, and logging analysis to get all of the data we need.

Historically, advertisers were the primary “pushers” of third-party cookies. This would allow them to track your viewing behaviors across any properties where their ads appeared. Some people disliked this since there was no real value to the web user, and the advertisers got free data. This was perceived as not only a security and privacy issue , but also pushed the perception of third party cookies into a grey area. These conditions, and the rise of spyware and malware pushed OS, and browser companies to institute tighter control.

In the current world of social media , distributed web services, and widespread widget adoption, the value to the user has changed. There are many services, Lijit included, that offer value to the user during their browsing session, versus just “tracking” them. The key, is that the web user is informed about what sites they visit, and the kind of content they allow in their browser. It is important for companies to disclose how they use the information they collect, and Lijit does this in our privacy policy.

Overall, the message should be about awareness and consumer education. The value of enabling third party cookies can actually be additive to the consumer vs. being a security or privacy concern. Modern browsers allow you to whitelist services you trust, and there are many services on the web (such as Lijit) that deserve that trust.

Modern browsers have added the ability to keep a list of frequently used search engines available for quick access at the top of your browser. If you’re using Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 you can add any Lijit search engine to that list. Simply go to a blog that has a Lijit Search Wijit on it, that user’s profile page or their search result page. You’ll notice an extra item in the list of search engines allowing you to add it to your list. Now anytime you need to do a search on that person, you can easily select their name and do that search. Below are screenshots for both IE7 and Firefox:

Internet Explorer 7:

Firefox:

Tumblr is a relatively new blogging platform that allows for easy short form posting of content, audio and video. It is highly customizable, and very easy to use, but interestingly, it is missing the ability to search through posts. Enter our Lijit Search Wijit.

Tumblr makes it very easy to add custom HTML and javascript to the layout.  For example, my tumblog, has a completed customized theme, and includes the Lijit Search Wijit.

So how was I able to add Lijit to my tumblog? It just a few simple steps:

Step 1:

Sign up for Lijit. If you already have an account, just log in, and navigate to the link “My Search Wijit.”

Step 2:

Add your social content and build out your network. (If you have already done this, skip this step).

Step 3:

Customize your Wijit to fit your Tumblr theme. You are only constrained by the theme’s layout. Then click on “Install the Wijit.”

Step 4:

Select and copy the code on the right hand side of the page. It should look like this:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.lijit.com/informers/wijits?type=pvs&username=username&js=1″></script><a style=’color: #999′ href=’http://www.lijit.com’ id=’lijit_wijit_pvs_link’>Lijit Search</a>

Now comes the hard part:

Step 5:

Login into your Tumblr account. Click on the customize icon:

Step 6:

In the Description field, paste the code you copied from your Lijit account where you want it to appear. (I decided to put it after a bit of text):

Step 7:

click “Save Changes.”

All done.  Yup, it is that easy to install Lijit in Tumblr.

Want a couple of other examples outside of my tumblog?

• Lindsay Campbell (who put the Wijit in her footer)
• Bijan Sabet (who has placed several widgets in his description field)
• Alex King (who has made his tumblog look a lot like his main blog).

Micah shot me an interesting article the other day. It is titled “The Fight for the Second Click“. It’s pretty interesting and predicts Google’s move into (more) media services in order to monetize the click that occurs after “the search”. Google clearly owns the first click and has managed to monetize it rather effectively. In order to continue the revenue ramp, they will be increasingly forced to own the second click.

I found this concept fascinating. At Lijit we know from watching reader behavior on our publishers’ sites that a huge percentage (33%-50%) of readers come from horizontal search (The Second Click).

We also know that the normal behavior of one of these readers is to read the article that Google referenced and then hit the back button. Reader gone, moment lost, second click wasted.

This is precisely why the Lijit Re-Search feature was added to the Lijit Search Wijit. When you have this feature turned on, Lijit hooks the reader into staying for a third click and beyond. Bottom line, you only get one click to keep to your readers around – do the most you can to mine that opportunity.

Re-Search activates when a reader enters your site from a horizontal search. When a reader types “Comcast tivo cablecard” into the Google box, many results are returned, perhaps thousands. If one of those results is a link to your publication (in this example, my personal blog) and that reader clicks it, they end up on your site and The Second Click has been executed.

On a normal site without the Lijit Wijit installed it’s now a crap shoot as to what happens to that reader next. Statistically speaking the back button is most often the next click. By contrast, as the reader reads the reference article/post, Re-Search goes out and finds other articles/posts written by you on that same subject and offers them up in the Search Wijit. When the reader is done reading the reference article, there now exists the opportunity for you, the publisher, to own the third click – one of the other articles/posts on that subject.

Publishers! Maximize your second click, the one you own!

A cool feature of Firefox is that you can add new search engines to the search box in the upper-right. An even cooler feature is that with Lijit, you can add your friends and experts as search engines.Here’s how mine looks right now:

To add someone, just go to their Lijit profile page, click the little down-arrow button on the search bar, and select the “Add” option at the botom of the list.

Here’s me adding Platinum Blonde, this week’s featured Blogger:

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.

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.