Saving the Sanctity of Search; A Lijit Success Story

• Posted: November 20, 2008
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• Author: Adam
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• Filed under: Social Media, Web 2.0
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• Tags: Falcor, Lijit, Lijit Search

Lijit, a tech start-up based in Boulder Colorado, has developed a widget that gets placed on a publisher’s website (like this one) and allows you to search the site as well as search across any social media platforms the publisher may utilize, be it Flickr, Digg or LiveJournal. Not only does this low profile search widget (see the right-hand sidebar of this site) help drastically improve the visitor experience, it also collects relevant data and presents me, the publisher, with excellent user-related statistics to help improve my content.

Below, you will find my official Lijit Success story.

*note: some journalistic license was used in this article

So this one time I was doin’ my online thing, which usually consists of a simultaneous cocktail of twitter monitoring, chronic email checking, Facebook stalking, blog reading, a glimpse at NASA’s astronomy picture of the day and the occasional peak at “the sketchy neighborhood of the internet” MySpace, when I heard a loud knock at the door. I creep downstairs wondering if I’m man enough to answer in my Transformers pajamas when the door spontaneously combusted into blue flame and I am greeted by a Large Fire Breathing Dragon who looks like an evil version of Falcor, from Never Ending Story parts 1, 2 & 3. Note, the difference between Good and Evil Falcor is that evil Falcor has horns…. and burns your house down with evil fire-breath.

With a swift right hook the evil Falcor picks me up and whisks me away to some undisclosed location. On the way to what I’m assuming is another dimension, I ask the grumpy grouch why he took me away from my ever-important online activity. He went into some rant about how I was sweet talking his girlfriend at the bar the other night and how he’s going to show her that he’s all the Dragon she needs. I try to explain to him that I am no competition for the great evil Falcor and how I was only complimenting her on her super cool multi-color zip-up hoodie, but he wasn’t buyin it.

A few minutes later, we landed on the edge of a cliff high above a sea of fire, something along the lines of the epic fight scene at the end of Lord of The Rings: Return of the King. He picks me up and takes a deep breath with a look in his eyes that would leave Chuck Norris trembling in his boots.  About to incinerate me, he hears his iPhone ring as he was just direct messaged by someone on Twitter. He contemplates whether to check it before or after he fries me like a Thanksgiving turkey in the south. After a few seconds he is subdued by suspense and checks his iTweet only to see it’s just another fake, marketing Twitter-bot which he then submits as spam. Just as he is about to put away his favorite digital companion and carry on with the execution I think fast and ask, “Wait! Have you read my blog post about Evil Dragons using Social Media to expand their online reach?” He pauses. After another second of contemplation he types in my url, www.AdamFullerton.com and scrolls up and down the page. Seeing no mention of Dragons and Social Media, (as there is no post, I was just stalling) I quickly tell him its an old post and he should use my Lijit search widget to find it, suggesting the query “Social Media Dragon”. Within milliseconds his search yields an old picture I have in my Flickr photostream of a beautiful lady dragon with HUGE… plates running down her spine and tail. The dragon is in awe of the reptilian beauty showcased in the high-resolution image found through the appropriate tags in the re-search function, and with big puppy-dog eyes you would more likely expect from the non-evil Falcor, asks, “Dude, do you know her?” To which I reply, “Yeah man, she was a model I used during a marketing campaign I did for DragonDerm Skin Lotion. If you want, I can give you her Twitter handle and email and put in a good word for you.”

After some social networking I was brought back to my charred house and safely placed back at my computer. I made the dragon promise to not be the Jealous, evil dragon type and leave us dorky online types alone, to which he was happy to agree, and we all live happily ever after.

So the moral of the story is, Make sure to install and properly configure the Lijit search widget on your blog. You never know when you are going to get abducted by a fire-breathing Falcor-like evil dragon seeking revenge. – Adam Fullerton, Satisfied Lijit User.

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