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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Lijit Acquires Comment Search Engine BigSwerve

image Lijit Networks, Inc., a company that provides revolutionary search tools and statistics for blog publishers, has announced the acquisition of BigSwerve, a leading startup in blog comment discovery. BigSwerve has crawled and indexed over 400 million comments from more than 3 million authors since its formation in 2006.

"BigSwerve's technology helps Lijit further discover the implicit and explicit expertise surrounding a publisher," said Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit. "To date, blog comments have represented a huge amount of user-generated content that has gone largely undiscovered and underutilized."

Lijit's search service enables publishers to share their expertise – in the form of posts, bookmarks, blogroll, and other aggregated social content – with readers via a search widget placed on the publisher's online property. In return, publishers receive detailed statistics, which help them better understand and serve their reader community. As a result of this acquisition Lijit will include blog comments in search results and statistics, as well as more accurately track the constantly changing social graph of influence that exists on the web.

"We look forward to integrating BigSwerve's technology with Lijit, providing additional value to their network of publishers and readers," commented Raj Bala, Founder of BigSwerve. Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Capital, a BigSwerve shareholder, further remarked, "BigSwerve has made significant progress in collecting and indexing difficult-to-mine content. Lijit will build upon BigSwerve's efforts, resulting in substantial benefit for their user community." Through this acquisition First Round Capital will also become a shareholder in Lijit.

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