One thing a lot of my readers notice since the start of this year was the different looks of the search functionality here in my blog. It’s not the built-in WordPress Search nor is it the one from Google, it is from a third party website called Lijit
What is Lijit?
First and foremost I’d like to clear that this is no way a sponsored review. In fact this post was in my drafts for like four months already so i might as well just work on this one.
Anyways one problem always with the search is that the built-in WordPress search isn’t as comprehensive and accurate as many of us want. Top bloggers like Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker agreed that it’s not really the best blog search engine available. On the other side of the fence, Google’s Search for blog may be a perfect alternative but making it work perfectly is quite a challenge since you need to tweak a lot of the algorithms and do all those geeky stuffs.
Lijit is MY best solution since its been very newbie-friendly while still having that robust functionality. It sports that web 2.0ish look while really not cluttering nor slowing down your blog.
You can get started by heading up to lijit website and basically signing up, its free anyways! Once done you’d do all the basic stuffs like putting up your blog’s name, feed and etc. The one unique feature with Lijit though is they incorporate your other social media accounts within their social platform. For instance, the search could return any article I’ve submitted through digg or stumbleupon etc. It can also fetch some of the posts from the blogs in the blogroll. Overall the add-on features are just exceptional.
Personalization is also as easy as hell. You can basically match the color schemes of the widget to your blog, modify the elements, use your own size and etc. There’s also an option wherein you could make your search results either on a light-box effect or have it on a different page instead.
Overall I really like Lijit and heck I wouldn’t write this long ass post if Im not recommending this one for you. 🙂 It’s not the perfect search but absolutely the ideal one for bloggers. It’s widely used by popular websites like the lolcats network and other famous sites like Problogger, Lamebook and etc. How about you? What do you think about Lijit? Have you had any bad experience with them?