Lijit Personal Search

I've got a couple cool widgets on this page and at my Tumblr at tonyleachsf.com. I like the ShareThis, which lets people send links to friends via email & to various social media sites very easily. Recently I added Lijit search (inspired partly by Chris Anderson), just to see what it's all about. It's the pink bar on the right.

From the user perspective, Lijit seems to be basically personal search. It takes the same angle as Tumblr, which I like, because it pulls from various sources (like the social networks I belong to) and aggregates the results into a single display. You can refine the results to show everything from my blog, from my online contributions to Digg, from sites in my "network," or from the web as a whole. Give it a try - search for something like "Tumblr" or "Apple" or "Zecco."

Lijit's powered by Google custom search, which makes sense. And while that gives legitimacy to its results, it also makes the results slightly less unique. Fortunately, Lijit makes it easy enough to use, manage, and install the widget as a publisher/blogger that it makes it uniquely valuable. Some highlights from the publisher perspective:

• You can customize your search widget across several dimensions, and make something that is fairly unique and similar to your own page.
  
• Customizing the widget from the Lijit site automatically makes the changes to your own site, once you've installed the javascript
• The "Lijit stats" page is very interesting, telling you where your readers/viewers are coming from. It's much better than FeedBurner or MyBlogLog stats

What's more? They're based in my hometown of Boulder, CO. It's great to see cool ideas come out of the place you grew up!

Some more thoughts:

• Something old from Mashable!
• Company Evangelism
  
• Getting Funded - TechCrunch
• My Hometown Paper Coverage
• CrunchBase