I’m loving lijit – lovin it!
Last week a friend asked me about lijit – a kind of social search engine based on Google custom. So, I started reading about it and the next thing I know I’d installed it on my sidebar. Wow! It was like a spiritual experience in user experience. I was reading one minute bought into the whole idea the next and a couple of clicks later I was there.
So how does it work – lijit enables you to search this blog and if what you seek is not here it’ll pull in content from other places I’ve contributed - Digg, delicious etc… If it’s not there, it’ll then look at the blogs I link to and the places they’ve contributed. You can even upload an RSS reading list. Fantastic!
The principle is based on ask a friend or friend of a friend – and relies on mutual trust within these mini circles. The depth of search is limited to your immediate friends, but things could get more interesting if this caught on with more people installing it creating deeper searching.
And unlike the doomed Wikia search launched last month, this doesn’t require me to do anything different, other than install it and carry on with business as usual.
Might not be a Google killer, but a simple idea well executed and I’m finding it more useful than a regular blog search box.
Nice one!
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Nilhan, thanks for giving Lijit a try and for the kind post. We’re doing our best to make search online work like it does in real life, while offering as much value to our publishers as possible. Also, if you haven’t yet, you should check out your Lijit stats when you get the chance. If you (or your readers) have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. I’m tara at lijit dot com.