Too Lijit: Google Site Search Has Competition

When it comes to search, Google typically has the solution. Site-specific search isn't that different. But Lijit, a company focused on providing site search services for blogs and Web sites, claims that Google is not nearly as invincible as the company is portrayed. Lijit is supposedly not too far behind, and this innovative start up could perhaps overtake Google in the near future.

Lijit offers users the opportunity to install search widgets on their websites and blogs, and this search widget not only searches the site's contents but also social networks as well. This provides a much more personalized and in-depth search result set that many people find to be effective. Lijit also includes a nice set of analytics tools to see how traffic is flowing through search.

Think of Lijit as a social search engine. This social search engine starts with the site's owner and his or her social networks, and then the search can expand to friends and networks of friends to bring relevant results.

This Widget is Lijit

Lijit released the numbers of a recently performed study that encompassed over 180,000 blogs during the timeframe of around a year. These blogs had over 1.2 million widgets installed total, with over 146,000 blogs having at least one widget.

To make Lijit's numbers worthwhile, Lijit needed to define what a widget was. So that is what they did: “Our definition of 'widget' is any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.”

If we can all agree with what Lijit defines as a widget, then the findings favor the company quite a bit, and some might call these findings “shocking.”

Lijit is so very close

The study revealed that Lijit had its widgets on 45 percent of the sites involved in the study, with Google ahead by the smallest of margins at 47 percent.

A Lijitimate Path to Success?

What knowledge can we possibly extract from Lijit's findings? Well, clearly Google Search has some competition when it comes to site specific search. It certainly wouldn't be devastating if Google lost the lead in site specific search, but, then again, maybe Google will simply put the Lijit team on the payroll if that is truly the case.

This also proves that having an impressive group of employees that reach out to the community can really be an effective marketing scheme. It is clearly obvious that the Lijit team is working hard to reach out to their users and make them happy, and word tends to travel fast on the Internet.

That's a lot of widgets

When all is said and done, we must make it clear that these numbers can't be taken too seriously — there is a glaring conflict of interest in this study, and that should make everyone think twice. Now, if an independent firm did this study and came to a similar conclusion, we might be inclined to rain praise all over Lijit's accomplishments. But for now, we will give them a nod of approval and send them on their merry way.

To find out more about Lijit's search products and services, or to simply contribute to the company's growth, check out their official Web site.

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