Search-Powered Web Apps

We are gearing up for our trip to Sin City later this week for the second annual Blog World Expo. To prepare, we started looking at the agenda of speakers and were pleasantly surprised to find so many that use the Lijit widget on their blogs. We knew that the following folks are smart (you have to be to qualify as a Blog World speaker), but seeing Lijit on their blogs makes them even smarter…

Nic Adler
Doyle Albee
Stowe Boyd
Chris Brogan
John Chow
Brian Clark
Jason Falls
Louis Gray
Daniel Ha
Tris Hussey
Guy Kawasaki
Paul Kedrosky
Jim Kukral
Howard Lindzon
Jake McKee
Scott Monty
Jeremy Pepper
Darren Rowse
Jennifer Satterwhite
Jeremy Schoemaker
Robert Scoble
Brian Solis
Dave Taylor
Robyn Tippins
Jim Turner
Erin Kotecki Vest
Denise Wakeman
Des Walsh

We’re looking forward to hearing the wisdom these speakers have to share and maybe, just maybe, giving them t-shirts!

Update: One of our favorite ladies, Wendy Piersall, was inadvertently left off the list. Sorry about that…

We released some new features last night and in order to take advantage of the improved functionality, you need to know about it. Away we go!

Invitations. You don’t have to make them by hand, fortunately, but you now have the ability to invite friends to join your searchable network within Lijit. From your Lijit ‘account’ page, you’ll see a new section underneath your account information. Click on the link under the header ‘Invite your Friends’ and you’ll get to the page that allows you to manually enter email addresses or import them from the contacts in your address book. (Don’t worry…we’re tied in with many email services!)

If your friends already have Lijit accounts, they will be automatically added into your network upon accepting the invite. (And if they don’t have Lijit accounts, they will be added in once they set up their account!)

New Re-Search options. In the past, if you wanted to utilize Re-Search on your blog, you only had the option of displaying results on top of your widget or at the top of your blog. We are proud to announce that you can now show that Re-Search goodness either above or BELOW your content. So, if someone comes to your blog through a Google or Yahoo search, they will get even more of your related content with the blog post. Using Re-Search allows random searchers to stay on your blog longer and to allow them to discover even more of your knowledge!

For example, if you do a Google search for ‘winamp itunes plugin’, the first result you get is a blog post from Daniel, one of Lijit’s finest. If you click on that result, you’ll be taken to his blog where you’re met with even more of his content, easily found underneath his blog post…

To change your Re-Search settings, simply log into your Lijit account and click on the ’search wijit’ tab. Scroll down to where you see Re-Search listed and pick your option out of the drop-down menu. Remember to save your new wijit settings!

Better integration with Vimeo and Viddler. We’re now serving up thumbnails from your Vimeo and Viddler content, meaning that searchers can now watch videos from within your search results. What could be cooler than a more multimedia approach to search results?

For example, if you search for Boulder on my blog, you’ll now see this doozy in the results from my content…

More robust search results. With the release last night, you’ll begin to see better search results from content sources like Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, Tumblr, and MyBlogLog.

Please let us know what you think of the new additions and send your feedback our way. We love hearing from our publishers and it’s important to know what YOU think about what we’re doing.

[Photo credit: zakwitnij via CC license]

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!

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!

It’s official. If you look for us here–

you’ll be able to pick us out from this list…

and easily put our wijit on your Typepad blog.

In addition, we are featured here:

It brings us much joy to know that Lijit is being accepted into the realm of Widget Galleries. (Now if they would only make us happier by changing their spelling to wijit!)

Today we added a Search Wijit customizer. If you’ve already have a Wijit installed, you can now match it to your blog. Just go to the Wijit pickup page. And if you don’t yet have a Wijit, well then sign up and get one!