Better search with Lijit
By Deepak on Aug 13, 2007 in Industry Analysis, Startups
I have blogged frequently about Lijit on my life science blog. Lijit is a Colorado based company and recently raised a round of funding. Recently I got a chance to meet Stan James, the CTO of Lijit, and Andy Stanberry, the UI guru at the company, at Gnomedex where we got a chance to talk about Lijit and what it is all about.
Simply put, Lijit is among my favorite “web 2.0″ sites. I can think of only Backpack and del.icio.us in the same stratosphere (not counting Gmail in this list), especially in terms of personal productivity. Still wondering what Lijit does? Jon Udell once said
Effective search depends on reservoirs of tacit knowledge and unconscious skill. Some people possess much deeper reservoirs, and/or can tap into them more effectively, than others. That makes them valuable
Lijit brings those concepts to reality. It allows you to tap into your network by leveraging Google Custom Search, and building about Stan James’ research into the concept of trust. Once I had signed into Lijit and provided it with my blog information and del.icio.us information, the service automatically adds my blogroll and del.icio.us network into a personalized search engine. This is a very simplified version, but also the first thing I did. You can continue to add your online world into Lijit, including MyBlogLog, Flickr, etc, thus extending the scope of your search. OPML files, individual sites, and RSS feeds can also be added to extend your search universe. The result is search that is free of pagerank gaming, significantly more contextual, and taps into the minds of your network. Another cool concept is re-search, which greatly enhances another concept of search that is very important for me; serendipitous discovery. I routinely use Lijit for search now, and have found sites that I might not have otherwise. Could a few things be improved? Of course. I did have some teething trouble when I signed up and a couple of other things could be more intuitive, but in general, the product is excellent, and via the search widget (the Lijit Wijit), google gadget, Facebook app and Firefox search bar, it is fairly viral as well.
Deepak, thanks for the great post. We are indebted to our Lijit users for their feedback and evangelism. Both Stan and Andy mentioned meeting you at Gnomedex and I think it’s great that we have the ability to put human faces to the Lijit profiles. Hopefully, you got a shirt out of them. Thanks again for being a passionate user.
Tara Anderson | Aug 14, 2007 | Reply
Just installed the Lijit “Wijit” on my blog, so far it works alright. I don’t like their search results page all that much and on top of that their software automatically “found” my site’s favicon, but in reality found the favicon of one of my buddies named Yihong. So I don’t know how that happened.
James | Aug 18, 2007 | Reply
Type your comment here.
mndoci | Aug 20, 2007 | Reply
I actually don’t end up on the Lijit site when I do a search but use the pop up window. That allows me to just stay on my blog. Not sure about the favicom. Write to them. They helped me through some teething trouble.
mndoci | Aug 20, 2007 | Reply
Tara,
Thanks for your comments. Yep, Andy hunted me down and gave me a shirt. It was wonderful meeting them and I spent time talking to both. I use Lijit on a daily basis. Not something one can say about every service out there.
mndoci | Aug 21, 2007 | Reply