Google Gets Serious About Blog Search. Look Out, Lijit!

When I met with the Lijit team in Boulder earlier this year, they asked an important question around brand loyalty. While I was already a user of Lijit, did I feel a loyalty to their brand over others? I thought a bit, and answered honestly, that I didn't (or at least not much). I said that if Google were to deliver an equal or better product to theirs, they were already the trusted name in search, and I would at least give them a shot. Today, Google has done just that, taking an element from Blogger In Draft, and releasing it into the wild. It's one of the many steps required to complete the marathon I told you about last week.

As Blogger announced today, the new Search Box gadget searches not only your own posts, but Web pages you link from your blog and blogs in your list (like a blogroll). This is quite comparable to Lijit's offering (see right sidebar), where users can search my blog, my social activity, and my blogroll.

I haven't yet installed the Google Blog Search gadget on my own blog yet, partly due to the fact I am using an older template, and don't yet want to break what works. But you can see the widget in action on Product Manager Rick Klau's blog on the right side.


Searching Rick Klau's Blog for FTP


Searching Links from Rick Klau's Blog for FTP


Searching the Web for FTP
For example, searching his blog for "FTP" displays the results in line on the blog without a pop-up window or going to a new page. I can click "Linked From Here" to see pages that have linked to Rick that also mention the term "FTP", or lastly, I can search "The Web" at large.

It is an elegant solution, so far as I can tell.

So what does this mean for Lijit? Lijit is striving to find a way to measure influence, as well as to develop an advertising network that is trusted for bloggers that use its products, so this doesn't mean the mighty Google swoops in and erases Lijit of the face of the Web. But Lijit will have to work hard to better define itself and make it differentiated from what Google offers - especially for Blogger users who haven't yet considered moving to WordPress.

Outbrain Gets Five Stars (And $12 Million) in Round B

While venture capital is said to be very expensive these days, hard to obtain, and with questionable potential returns given a closed market for public offerings and multiples for mergers and acquisitions, companies on the periphery of blogging appear to still be hot. We saw Auttomatic acquire Intense Debate late last year. You also remember strong funding rounds for my personal favorites, Lijit and Disqus, who are adding strong search and commenting functionality to sites like mine. Now, you can add Outbrain to the list, following this morning's announcement the company scored a $12 million round to expand its blog rating and recommendation platform.

Now, before you cry foul and ask where the money is in such a little widget, as is tempting, you can read between the lines in today's release to see that Outbrain has bigger plans - ones they no doubt shared with their VC partners, and not necessarily with me.

Outbrain is talking less about a widget, and more about finding great content across the Web. As one VC partner said, "Finding great content is getting both more difficult and more important... Outbrain's personalized recommended links offer great value to readers by combining their collective wisdom..."

If you think about it, Lijit and Outbrain are solving similar issues, from different angles. Lijit scours your personal blog and your social network of approved sites to find content you are searching for. Outbrain analyzes your individual posts, your previous blog entries and other blogs in their network to provide recommendations of what to read next. Both are useful, and both are getting traction. And it's good to see that good ideas are going to be rewarded, even when times are more difficult.

Lijit Search Is All About Relevance. Now Go Update Your Widgets!

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to fly out to Boulder, Colorado to meet with Lijit's executive leadership team, at the request of Micah Baldwin, the company's friendly tireless and unique evangelist. A happy Lijit badge wearer for the better part of the year, I initially started using the blog search engine thanks to its drop-dead simple integration into my site and associated search tag cloud (see the right column), but yesterday's discussion helped open my eyes to many things about Lijit that I have been missing, and you no doubt have as well.

Under our noses, Lijit has grown from a cute widget play to harnessing one of the most targeted search engine and content archives on the Web - but has done so in a way that's remarkably different than Google. Now, before you go to lijit.com and try to find a search button, let me explain...

Google's goal in life is to find the one right answer that is true for everyone. Search for iPhone, and you should get the same answer I do at the top of the results, blanketed by potentially relevant ads from the company's partners. Lijit's goal in life is to find the one answer that is most accurate, depending on where you are searching. Search for iPhone on my blog, and you will find the most relevant responses that come from my blog and my content from around the Web, including Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and other social sites. Search for iPhone on Steven Hodson's blog (also using Lijit), and you should get a different set of responses based on his activity.

There is no one right answer, and there shouldn't be, because we each look at the Web through a prism that is colored by our own activity. Lijit does this well. Google does not - even if they are working on it. Just think about how you search Google today. You almost certainly are searching with multiple keywords, not just one, because a broad search for "bicycle", "train" or "beagle" is going to be way too muddled. But search for "beagle" on my site, and you will get something personal.

Meanwhile, Lijit has also stepped up its game in terms of a more targeted advertising network, around its publishers and its highly targeted search results. The more relevant the search and the more relevant the data around the searcher and the publisher where the search is taking place, the higher the click-through rates. The company showed us details that illustrated significant click through differences between them and Google - the 800 pound gorilla in the space. Publishers who opt in to the Lijit network can set a floor for what they estimate their cost per click should be, and Lijit will work to get that price - promising no less than 10 cents to the publisher per click on an ad.

The company also turned on revenue sharing for publishers, so if you have been running Lijit search on your blog for some time, you should log into your Lijit account and see if you've racked up any earnings. You could have money owed you haven't collected on!

The New Widget's Three Faces
Speaking of updates you probably didn't know about... I learned yesterday that the widget I have been using for Lijit was out of date. They now offer an "all in one" widget that not only shows a search bar and search terms (and reshare when people find your site from a search engine) but also detail on those recent visitors, including geography. At one point I was running a similar script from Feedjit (not Lijit) to get that data, and Lijit gives it to me in one place. To get yours, go to lijit.com, log in, and click "Search Wijit" at the top. On the left side, you can see a checkbox to make yours an "all-in-one Wijit!". There are even new options like a "Surprise Me!" bar that will take you to a random post on the blog you are visiting.

In the past, I have been fairly vocal in terms of saying that blogging is not about the ads and the revenue (at least for me). I believe that when you cross the line from blogging for the experience and for content discovery and move to pro blogging, it becomes all about the money. But Lijit has made strides toward making ads less intrusive and more relevant to you and the visitor, making them "less evil" and likely more rewarding.

The next big step for the company will be to better explain what they do and what they want to be when they grow up. I've already seen big moves, not just between when I first discovered Lijit, and today, but also in terms of how the company is a real business with a real roadmap and big plans. They're not out to take Google head on, or anything crazy like that, but they are about delivering the best, personalized, search results to the publisher and the viewer.

Like I have championed for Disqus to become the standard for blog comments, I would strongly hope Lijit becomes the standard for blog search. It just works, and the team continues to innovate. Now go update your widgets.

Making My Blog Search Legit With Lijit

Blog widgets are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, but offering a strong search function on your Web site is a must, regardless of how cleanly you've laid out your archive pages, or how well you've implemented tags or labels. A little over a week ago, after seeing Lijit growing its presence on many other blogs I follow, I integrated the service into my site, letting users find older stories I've written on topics they find interesting, and opening up yet another box of stats for me to play with, including most frequently used search terms.


Looking back in my e-mail archives, it looks like I first signed up for Lijit back in June of 2007. If I remember correctly, I think I implemented it, but later, it got pulled in some blog redesign. This time, it's likely here to stay. On May 16, I undoubtedly polluted the Lijit user database, signing up again and getting a second account. Oops.

Acting as a front-end for Google Blog Search, Lijit places a simple search box on your blog, letting visitors search your archives, but also, it pre-populates if somebody arrives on your site from having completed a search elsewhere. For example, if I do a Google search for "FriendFeed Tips", and click on FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, Lijit helpfully asks, "Looking for more about friendfeed tips?" and gives what it would provide as the best links in my blog, as well as through content delivered from other services I use around the Web, such as MyBlogLog and Del.ico.us.

Search results from Lijit are displayed as a pop-in window in the Web browser, not asking you to leave the site, but instead, showing you the results, surrounded by Google AdSense. Of interest, Duncan Riley said on FriendFeed yesterday that not sharing the revenue with the bloggers themselves was "not cool", but I hadn't given that much thought before implementing.

The most visible benefit of using Lijit is showing site visitors what the most popular searches are, either on my blog, or used to find the blog. As of today, the top ten terms are: FriendFeed, Twitter, Blogger, Lijit, Techmeme, BlogRize, MyBlogLog, ReadBurner, FriendFeed to Watch and Duncan Riley.


Also very helpful is the ability to filter what is displayed. I've mentioned before that there's a core element of Web perverts who like some pages in my archives, so I get all sorts of odd traffic from dirty keywords, which I don't want shown, so I can hop into my Lijit page and add these unwanted terms to the filter.


Meanwhile, as Lijit is watching my site traffic for search activity, it's also monitoring standard blog tracking tools, including page views, how many visitors are coming, and where they are coming from. Combining the two facets of the service, from search to statistics, Lijit can tell me which countries search for what most frequently, what is the city that offers me the most visits (Mountain View, CA), and from what country did my most recent search terms originate. I can also see which pages proved most popular after search terms were entered.

So it works. Good stuff. And while I underplayed Lijit's integration with other services like MyBlogLog, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Disqus, Digg, YouTube, etc., this element may become more important in the future, as site visitors can do more than search just my blog, but they can search all across my network, 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. I'll be watching this to grow over time, and hope to report back and say if site visitors are doing more than searching my blog, but searching my content as well. I've enabled a dozen different sites to pull from, so have at it.