Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

I’ve been using the Lijit Search Engine widget for a few of my blogs for a few months now, and I have to say: I LOVE IT!

Lijit is a plugin for Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger blogs. Any blogger who writes informatively really should have this widget– Lijit is so impressive and so powerful that a blog would seem empty without it. I have Lijit installed on several of my blogs (including this one), and it is perhaps the most effective on my travel blog, New York Traveler.net. That blog is filled with information, photos, videos, tips, and links to thousands and thousands of bits of information that I could not otherwise organize. Lijit gives visitors the ability to thoroughly search that blog for even the smallest bit of information (everything from pet supplements to hurricanes!).

The Lijit widget is 100% customizable. And you can see from the screenshot above that I have included the ability for readers to search not only my travel blog, but all my Flickr photos, my YouTube videos, and mo other blogs as well. And when the Lijit window pops up with search results, there is the ability for readers to search my blog for relevant information, for content (photos, videos, etc), my network (other blogs in my blogroll) and etc. And lijit includes small screenshots with the search results, too. It’s a really professional look. Here are some screenshots showing a quick search I did on “erie canal.”

I’m extremely impressed with Lijit. Moreover, the plugin does a LOT more than show search stuff for your visitors. Your Lijit account (you must create an account in order to use the plugin for your blog) allows you to get very detailed information about page views, your search information, and visitors. It’s just amazing. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but I think Lijit is better because it’s more user friendly AND it comes with that nifty search engine plugin for the blog.

And like I said, the blog widget is customizable. It’s a pretty amazing piece of software! It’s also amazing that it’s entirely free.

I also have speciall affection in my heart for Lijit thanks to the unswerving efforts of Grace Boyle, who works on business development with the Lijit dudes, and whose cheerful and insistent nagging to try Lijit finally proved successful. And when I procrastinated and had questions, Grace was right there to offer loads of suggestions and even tweak a few things on her end. I’m glad she was so patient with me– I just LOVE Lijit!

The Wordpress plugin page for Lijit is here. There are some short video tutorials about Lijit here. Check out Lijit. Mrs. Mecomber gives it a hearty THUMBS UP!