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.