I’m trying out a new search feature here at BitchHQ, called Lijit. If you take a look down yonder in the search column, instead of the multiple drop down boxes of content, there’s now two (reviews by grade and reviews by author) and a new search entry form. Type a word in there and you’ll get an overlay that displays results for the site, plus the rest of the whole dang internet if you want.
I’m liking it so far, especially because as the site gets bigger ever single day holy smoke, it gets more cumbersome to search so I’m liking this option so far. Plus there’s this bubble explore thing (under the text window) that lets you explore who links here and who we link to, and then see who else is all four degrees of what what in the butt. This is kind of fun.
But if you haterate it or have some problems, please let me know. I’m trying to make the site a little more friendly to newcomers.
I like it.
It seems a bit slower with the extra layer of lijit than the straight Google custom search engine.
More troublesome is that it doesn’t play nice with a small screen (12”). The results box is cut off on the side so that I can’t read the search results column. That’s too bad, because I was kind of curious to see what a search for ‘man titty’ would pull up. 🙂
Ann, you’ll be pleased to know that the “man titty” search pulls up mostly references to SBTB! There are a couple of YouTube videos and a DA thread, and then we devolve into results featuring “man titties” which is not at all the same thing (Urban Dictionary and the rest of the WWW seem to agree that “man titties” are what overweight men have, not at all what we look for in a romance cover, methinks).
I think the new search features will be cool once I get used to them.
I had trouble getting out of it. I need to play around with it more, but I think it will be a good addition.
Can you add a couple words to the beginning and end of the results phrase? The results were a little vague, but if you can add two more words to the front and back of the phrase, I think that would make it more identifiable.
Ann: Thanks for the feedback on the 12” screen – I’m going to ask about it.
SusanL: to get out of it, there *should* be an “X” in a circle that sits over to the right of the screen.
And Taylor, what do you mean by add a couple words? You mean on the side column to more clearly state what it is?
Having the results of the search be in a dynamically resizable window would help a lot. I see a lot of white space on the right and a column of links less than half the size of the full-screen Lijit pop-up on the left.
to me those are man boobies, not titties.
Not having any problems with it. As long as I am playing with the right thingy.
Remember I am not a techno phobe, although I finally did get Stanza loaded onto my itouch. Now to find books for it.
Is it possible to keep the drop-down box for the categories? There are times when I just want to look at one thing (the HABOs, for example), and I’ve turned a couple of people onto the site by directing them to the cover snark archives. I think the search functionality is good, but my preference would be for it to augment the drop down, not to replace it.
Sybylla: Done. I put it back.
Sorry about that! I searched a couple other terms this morning (like ‘mantitty’) and the results were better. I apparently just chose the wrong word to search and it gave me wonky results.
Thanks for giving Lijit a try Sarah and a big thank-you to all the Smart Bitches readers for providing such excellent feedback.
After speaking with a developer here, there’s nothing we can currently do about the size of the box that displays the search results. I understand that if you’re using a smaller monitor, it’s impossible to scroll down and see the results. While we are aware of this issue, I’m not sure when we’ll be able to fix it. Sorry Ann!
If other readers have any questions or feedback, you can also send it my way. I’m tara at lijit dot com and I welcome any thoughts from Smart Bitches!
That’s weird (sorry). Lijit seems to be an extra layer on top of the Google Custom search engine (in some way, since it displays the Google logo). I used Google CSE on one of my sites and the box resizes itself to fix the screen and I had no problems with it on my monitor. There is no good reason (from a user perspective) for the 60% white space in the search results box. That white space is what is causing the problem for small screen sizes too.
There was a visitor earlier who said that they couldn’t “get out” of lijit. I just ran into that when I hit the “explore” icon below the search box. There is no intuitive way to get back into the site and no explanation of what you are supposed to do with that screen. It’s a dead end. It may serve a function, but I have no idea what it is or how to go about figuring out what it is. I had to close the site and open it again.
If I need to do a search I’ll just do it through Google, me thinks.
I gave it a bit to see if it’s consistent, and it is… Since you added this to the page, my load times have been horribly slower, especially when I’m loading a single post (with comments) from a feed reader (specifically GoogleReader). Like, hanging, little-white-box, refuse to load for a full sixty seconds kind of slow load times.
I think there must be a correlation.
This isn’t a problem with Lijit, but Google search (and Lijit) report comments on the wrong posts or in the wrong categories. E.g. a search for “Lijit” finds 32 instances, all inside this post (which has only 14 comments). Most of the extras seem to be repeats associated with the wrong posts – see the bolded URLs from a Google search, below. The same “I had trouble getting out of it” comment appears under
/lijit/
/lijit/P10/
/tag/muffin+top/
/once_bitten_twice_shy_by_jennifer_rardin/
/tag/jewish/
And another comment from this post appears under
/on_wallpaper_historicals/