lijit - Search Based On Your Content

lijit is a new search application designed for publishers, which, with the advent of applications like Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc… we all are to some degree.

lijit enables you to add a search widget (er.. wijit) to your site or blog and return results based on your network of content. For example, if someone searched this site through the lijit search (very top right) for “Community Crush” (shameless plug I know, you might experiment with “Wordcamp” too and get a lot back) you would get results from all of my content sources (Facebook, twitter, this blog, Linkedin, stories I’ve dug, …). In another tab, you can see search results from my “network” or sites that I follow and/or trust. Of course you can get plain ol’ web results too or you can get results that are specific only to this site.

The idea is that it aggregates all of my content and trusted sources so you can find it in one place while still differentiating between my content (in the case of me) or content from my network.

It’s a clever idea and one which should do well. I’m going to continue testing it for a while but if all goes well I’ll remove the default search for this site and use only the lijit wijit.

I learned about lijit at WordCamp 2008 while talking to Aaron Brazel who is now working with lijit.

lijit has also secured $7.1M in Series C funding so they should be araound and doing well for sometime. I’m looking forward to seeing how this grows and evolves.

If you’re a WordPress user they also have a lijit search plugin with integrated statistics to replace the default WordPress search. I’ll be pluggin that in shortly. Note: ***This plug-in is only available for those WordPress users with versions 2.3-2.6.***

Do some lijit searches and let me know how it works for you.