Next Automattic Buy: Too Lijit to Quit

WordPress search sucks. There’s no nice way to put that. If you’re using running WordPress and are using the default search engine, your visitors would likely find it faster to get the information they need with a bus ticket to your house.

Though most of the platform is great, the search has always been the pits. Unfortunately, even as media handling, plugin installation and other features have grown up and become big boy tools, WordPress search has remained as daft as a speak and spell.

However, Automattic has this nice habit of buying up companies that fix their own weaknesses. Need blogger profiles? Buy Gravatar. Commenting system sucks? Buy Intense Debate.

So, in that spirit, I’d like to suggest their next big purchase. Lijit.

It seems simple enough to me. WordPress search stinks, there’s no easy way to fix it, Lijit solved the problem for Automattic and is making a tidy sum doing it.

The pairing seems natural to me at least. But I could be wrong…

WordPress Search: Epic Fail

If you want to play around with this problem. Feel free to use this blog. Since this site is fairly new and doesn’t have enough posts yet, I haven’t changed out the default search engine.

Now, do a search for Hurricane. You’ll get a few posts that are relevant but this post should come up first (unless you’re reading this much later after I post it).

The reason is simple, WordPress search is stupid. It looks for the keyword in the articles and orders the articles not on relevance, but on date posted.

To a reader, this is completely useless. They are likely searching because they’ve seen the newest posts, didn’t find what they need and have to pluck something meaningful from the archives. This means that almost every search result starts off with the least useful articles possible.

Of course, I don’t fault Automattic or WordPress for this. Relevance is hard and though plugins exist to help improve the search function, they are limited in what they can do. The problem is that effective search requires a lot of server resources, more than what most WordPress hosts can provide.

With almost no middle ground between “fast and ineffective” and “slow but useful”, offloading the search function makes sense. Since it is rarely used and can really drain a server, letting someone else handle the problem is a great solution.

This is why many bloggers just use Google custom search on their blog, partner with the best, maybe get some ad revenue and leave the old search behind.

WordPress needs to fix this problem if they are going to become a one-stop solution, fortunately, Lijit has the answer.

Why Lijit Makes Sense

Lijit makes sense because, like IntenseDebate, it is already so closely tied with WordPress. Even though the focus of Lijit is supposed to be aggregating search across all of a blogger’s content, including the social sites they participate in, the primary use is still to search within the blog itself.

Though it can be installed on any blog platform, the most common use I’ve seen is on WordPress blogs and the most common function is to replace the WordPress search. It is that simple.

I can’t tell for certain, but I’d estimate that most of Lijit’s hits stem directly from how bad WordPress search is out of the box.

Rather than having a company make its own profit from your shortcomings, doesn’t it make sense to buy the company, or at least the technology, and take the revenue for yourself?

The only questions Automattic should have are A) Would it be cheaper to buy Lijit or to create their own technology or B) Would Lijit be a company that is small enough for acquisition, it having received many millions in venture capital funding.

Either way, Automattic has to get this search issue resolved. Though it’s been a back-burner problem for WordPress for some time, as blogs grow larger and WordPress is used more and more as a full CMS, the search rapidly becomes the weakest link.

Conclusions

The bottom line is this, Automattic has two options. They can buy Lijit or they can fix search themselves. They can’t, as a company, allow another company to reap profits from their own shortcomings. That is leaving money on the table.

In short, it is time to turn this search problem into an opportunity. I think this has the chance to be a real profit-center for Automattic and WordPress in general.

It is time to jump on board and try to fix this problem. Failure to do so could result in a solution that remains forever out of WordPress’ hands.