Posts Tagged ‘search’
Understanding how search engines crawl and index websites can be a broad and confusing topic. Everyone does it a little bit differently, but the overall concepts are the same. Here is a quick breakdown of things you should know about how search engines crawl your website. (I’m not getting into the algorithms, keywords or any of that stuff, simply how search engines crawl sites.)
Tags: search, tech, tips | View Comments
It’s the question that everyone wonders about. Is anyone else using Lijit? And if so, what are they being searched for?
You now have access to that kind of information via the new Lijit Twitter account, Whos Lijit. (Don’t get us started on the missing apostrophe…we’re calling it twammer–grammar for Twitter.) The tweets are real-time searches that are being done on blogs with Lijit installed and the link included in the tweet takes you to the actual search results. Updated every 15 minutes, this new twitterstream provides a very interesting look into the world of Lijit’s publishers.
For example, there are some searches that make you wonder…”How does a golden gopher taste?”
Then there are the searches that make complete sense…
Some of the searches that you see in the tweetstream can make you hungry and provide inspiration for lunch…
Let’s not forget the searches that make you want to learn more about useful life skills...
Not to mention the searches that make you chuckle a little to yourself…
And of course, we can’t forget the searches done in Indonesia…
If we’ve piqued your interest, be sure to check out WhosLijit and have fun discovering new content. You’re welcome. 
Tags: Lijit publishers, search, wijit | View Comments
Today, we successfully launched Lijit search on BlogHer.com. Of all the publishers I have helped to add Lijit to their sites, I am most excited about BlogHer.
There are plenty of reasons, BlogHer’s mission, the number of BlogHer bloggers that I have met personally and respect, even the ability to not speak for two days during the BlogHer conference, but the truth is, I am excited about BlogHer because it so closely matches the mission of Lijit.
We aim to bring trust to search.
Can you trust standard search engines, of course you can. Mostly. Some of the results are spammy. We know that, and we deal with that. Sometimes you dont find what you are looking for because the search engines have deemed the content inappropriate to include in their index.
Lijit takes the opposite approach. BlogHer has identified more than 2,000 publishers that write on many varied topics, but that are all trustworthy. We trust BlogHer and therefore have included all of those publishers’ content in the Lijit index.
That way, when you go to BlogHer.com and perform a network search, you will discover publishers whose content you can trust. You may have never heard of the blogger, but more often than not, you will find a publisher that you will probably continue to read over and over.
For example, if you do the search “gluten free” on the BlogHer.com Network, the first result is Gluten Free Mommy (imagine that!) talking about gluten free recipes. The same search on Google returns GlutenFree.com, a shopping site, which really provides very little information about gluten free diets. Which would you rather read? I know which one I would return to.
We are very excited to welcome BlogHer to the Lijit family, and look forward to the continued growth of our relationship.
Tags: blogher, networks, search | View Comments
This week Cuil launched. We pay attention to everyone in the search space even though we really don’t consider most companies competitors. Lijit builds search based applications that install on publishers sites. We selected that mission very carefully because publishers are first and foremost our customer. We don’t operate a destination search site but rather empower the sites we reside on and the publishers we serve. Lijit has all the parts of a search company, we have lots of computers crawling and indexing the web and our secret sauce is the way we bring a level of trust to results and an alternate methodology to ranking pages.
In the world of destination search, Google pretty much owns the show. It’s not impossible for that to change as witnessed by Google’s own rise. The latest contender in destination search is Cuil. I tried a few searches and had really good results. Others, not so much.
I had to chuckle at the Cuil results for a search for “Lijit”.
Cuil seems to lead with the Wikipedia definition of things (as do many other destination search engines – much to Google’s consternation). In our case the top result is the Wikipedia page Stan made about us a long time ago. (An aside: Now, I’m pretty sure we are the most knowledgeable people about “lijit” but Wikipedia outwardly dogs our entry as being a “conflict of interest” regarding this subject matter. It seems to me that requiring people less knowledgeable to be involved is a conflict of interest with regards to Wikipedia).
Anyway, where I was going here are the images. I kind of like the tabloid presentation of things but where did these images come from?
Apparently the best match images of “Lijit” is of a tire company logo, a boat of some type, a “buy now” button (our service is free), and my favorite a guy sniffing glue.
Search is hard..
Tags: search | View Comments
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:
Tags: features, search, tech | View Comments
Google Custom Search is cool. And it’s a natural step for Google to distribute their search technology (dare I say “longtail-ize”?) in the same way that they distributed their ad technology when they expanded Adwords (on their domain) into Adsense (on anyone’s page). So it was a natural fit for us to use it as the backend for our Lijit Personal Network Search, and we’ve been happy with the initial results.But it’s not perfect.
Ethan Zuckerman wrote about problems with Co-op search back in October, and Google quickly responded with a fix. However, we’re seeing a lot of Ethan’s problems here at Lijit as well. The problem is that if your desired search results would not normally fall in the top 1000 results of a normal Google search, they don’t get included in your results. For example, Brad Feld has written a ton about Microsoft in his blog at feld.com as can be seen in a typical site: Google search. However, when you use a Co-op search which includes feld.com/*, you don’t get any results fromthat domain. The problem seems to be that feld.com doesn’t make it into the top 1000 results for a normal search for ‘”microsoft”. In a similar vain, if you search me for “sex” you’ll get stuff from BoingBoing (a high PageRank site) but not my post “Attention is Meme Sex” like you might expect.*
So it seems that the fixes implemented for Ethan aren’t working across the board. But I am encouraged by Google’s response to Ethan and hope that they will eventually be able to solve our issues.
Tags: search, tech | View Comments