Lijit - Personal network search startup gets funding

By Vivek | January 22nd, 2007 at 11:31 am ET         

Lijit, which started off as Outfoxed last year from the masters thesis of its founder Stan James, has secured $900K in funding. The investment round was participated by Colorado Fund I, managed by High Country Venture, Brad Feld, Seth Goldstein, and Paul Berberian, former CEO of Raindance Communications.

Lijit is a search mashup widget creator. Lijit wants bloggers, researchers, and ordinary users to expose their complete information network from where they gather and analyze information everyday. Personally I use have very broad range of RSS feeds, Google, Google bookmarks, Google Custom Search Engines, Wikipedia, and many more avenues to gather very specific information faster. However my part of search world stays with me and there is no real possible way for me to share it with other people. Lijit wants to automate this important piece effort done by each of us and make sharing of these personal networks easier. You quickly and easily create you Lijit Widget, called Wijit, that can automatically create Google Custom Search Engine searching across your favorite sites, include your feeds, del.icio.us / flickr / digg / Reddit / Youtube / Stumbleupon….. accounts. You can than grab the widget code and place it on your blog or web site to enable people to search across your personal network. To give users a starting point, Lijit has partnered with FeedBurner to enable searching across it’s 200 publisher-organized networks.

As part of future plans, Lijit wants to provides ways for users to monetize their content networks using Google Adsense and maybe some other means. But do you think power users will really give out their information network for Google Adsense cents, which in the first place takes a good deal of effort to build? Personally I really like the idea of Lijit but they will have to work hard to this community effort ball rolling.

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