Lijit, the search widget that offers bloggers a simple solution to index all of their content, has been slow for the last few months: Really. Freakin. Slow. Search results have been taking 20 seconds or more to load (though it’s unlikely that many people stuck around to see them), rendering the service useless.
Thankfully, Lijit has been on the ball, and has recently spent over $500,000 to increase their server capacity. Lijit CEO Todd Vernon says that the site was having a hard time coping with rapid growth since January, and that the slow speeds and sporatic downtime in April and May occurred during their move from independent server boxes to a dedicated server farm. Now, he says, the site has at least five times as much server capacity, with room to grow. Let’s hope that’s enough - bloggers aren’t going to put up with something that bogs down their site and drives away traffic.
In May the site also managed to snag a deal with b5media, a blogging network with 350 properties. Lijit lets users simultaneous search through content on a particular blog and on related sites, which appeals to b5media because it increases traffic between their own blogs. Vernon says that the initial response has been very positive, with a pageview increase of 1.5% across the network directly attributed to the widget.
Always nice to see that a fellow Colorado startup snagged a big deal…great job guys! Keep up the kicking ass!
Cool I hear that Biz Dev guy has it going on! So when is Mike going to get it up on the TechCrunch site? A 1.5% page view increase for free sounds like a great deal to me. I know some people and will make sure to get you hooked up!
20 seconds or more to load? I have used them daily and never seen that much of a lag (perhaps 1-2 seconds, but feels like 20?).
They have built a great app, love seeing them grow.
As someone who worked at b5media while the Lijit deal was happening and now is working on the Lijit side of the house, thanks for the coverage on both fronts. Fortunately, the b5 deal came when it did because it forced Lijit to address longterm scaling issues that might have otherwise crept up over time. Better to hit that stuff early on.
Thanks for the writeup, Jason.
Always nice to see that a fellow Colorado startup snagged a big deal…great job guys! Keep up the kicking ass!
Yeah were hoping for a similar deal here in Arizona. Arkayne is in the same space and were looking for investors for our first official round starting next month.
http://www.arkayne.com
Just moved things over to Amazon EC2, hopefully we can scale as well as Lijit with much less investment. Any suggestions welcome…
douche bag.
Beyond the basics of speed of delivery is the critical sanctity of Publishers private statistics. We at P.U.B. consider the safety of the information any app or widget(s) may be gathering, unbeknownst to the unwitting Publisher who installs them.
P.U.B. [Publishers Union of Bloggers] has pending inquires to Widget Providers concerning how they generate their income and what percentage of this income goes to the Blog Publisher making the critical decision to allow a Widget on their site for their readers. In addition we are requesting transparency on the critical issue of how the private statistic from Publishers Blogs are being used, hopefully with the Publisher’s permission!
P.U.B. expects to heard back from Lijit on these financial and private statistics issues from P.U.B’s inquiry we sent to Lijit in mid April 2008. When we do we will let great Blog Publishers like you know their deal. Currently we are also working with Blog Publishers to track performance hit evaluations of Widgets too. Let us know if you have any follow up on any of these important issues for the blog community and the performance issue.
Will publish these results to keep the community of Blog Publishers informed on this critical component of Widgets on our Blogs.
Sincerely,
Barney Moran for P.U.B.
Theres no reason for the bad blood. Arkayne and Lijit are in somewhat different spaces, Lijit does search, Arkayne does context linking. I remember when Lijit first showed up on the net, its a great application.
As far as getting the word out about Arkayne? Its TC, readers want to know more. SphereIt which is running at the bottom of Every TC page is also in the same space, my advice, focus on what you do well and don’t get side tracked.
Who knows one day we may be working together…
They are powered by Google, they don’t index themselves. What is their competitive advantage over say Eurekster, who just went the way of the dodo? (besides having money in the bank)
Sorry, I am a search guy, I am going to be hard on other search companies. I really don’t see the technology here beyond the spiffy interface.
@dumbfounder Lijit indexes over 80% of our publishers ourselves. Some publishers work better with Google and Google is a great partner of ours. The advantage over Eurekster is that we utilize the publisher natural social graph rather than requiring a lot of configuration (thats just not that fun), and the readers analytics we provide are of really high value to our users. Give us a try and I think you will like what you see.
@dumbfounder, I love the Lijit concept, especially since I have a pretty good blogroll and delicious network to tap into. So the search idea … Google + my trusted network really makes sense to me. For general searching Google is still the best place to go, but for specific searches in the scientific or computing space, I tend to default to lijit (the firefox searchbar helps)
As a very small blogger, I find that the value from lijit comes not only from being able to search effectively, but also in the statistics that they provide publishers on a weekly basis. By knowing what people searched me for, I can tailor my blog to what is interesting to others, and thus increase readership. Very valuable!
Lijit rocks! It’s easy to install, configure, and provides significant benefits to my publishers. By using Lijit, I have confidence that my readers are being presented with the most relevant answers to their search requests. Not only does my content show up, they get the knowledge of my network included no extra effort. Also, I find the stats very insightful and enjoy looking at them on a weekly basis. As far as load time, it’s fine. I agree with Andrew Hyde, claiming loads of 20 seconds is an exaggeration by about 18.
I must agree with the momblogger. At the end of the day, Lijit’s real value is the stats that it easily provides to small and medium-sized bloggers trying to create content which will keep readers on their blogs and will attract new visitors. The interface has been great for me - because I look at my stats and two minutes later I can start writing posts that my last few visitors or the majority of my visitors seemed to be interested in. Love it!