#86!  Not bad considering 50 sites are “undiscovered” (like us) and 50 sites are “classics” like Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Flickr, etc.  Thank you to all of our fantastic users for making things like this possible!

PCMAG.com – “The Top 100 Web Sites of 2010″

We’ve seen a few tickets requesting ways to filter search results.  Instead of making the search form more complicated by adding more fields we’ve enabled some advanced search features.  If you’re brave and want to use some of these feel free to give it a shot and let us know what you think.

“cat dog” means “cat AND dog” - This is the default mode and it will return auctions with both “cat” AND “dog”.

“cat | dog” means “cat OR dog” – This will return auctions with the words “cat” or “dog” in them.  That isn’t a capital “i” or a “one” … it should be the vertical bar on the same key as “”.

“reward !coke” or “reward -coke” means “reward AND NOT coke” – This is probably going to be the most useful for you guys based off the suggestions we’ve gotten.  This will return auctions with the word “reward” but will exclude auctions with the word “coke”.  When you use the “!” or “-” symbol you must have another search term (choosing a category doesn’t count).  This means searching for “!coke” is invalid.

“(cat dog) | bird” means “(cat AND dog) OR bird” – Parenthesis can be used to make complex queries.  The example given will return auctions with the words “cat” and “dog” or just the word “bird”.  Now for something a bit different, if you did “cat dog | bird” you might think it would be the same thing, but it actually translates to “cat and (dog or bird)”.  The OR actually has higher precedence than AND.

Confused yet?  Have fun!

Happy Thursday!  We’ve listened to everyone’s comments about “that stupid map” and we’ve “gotten rid of that useless thing” =)  You’ll notice the layout of our browse page has a few minor changes as well … don’t worry you’ll all get used to it.  Along with this we’ve also released our Premium Auctions where  you can now spend some of your credits to promote your auction on Listia.  Premium auctions get a bold title, placement on the new browse page as well as on the auction page.  The cost for this will vary based on the the number of positions open so if you see this option for cheap be sure to snatch it up!  You can add this to your auction after you list an auction in your tool bar.  To see the most up to date pricing be sure to refresh your auction page.  To be eligible for Premium Auctions you have to have your Seller Wings badge.

Have fun!

We had a great birthday last week and we had a ton of orders to fulfill, but we finally got your shirts out today!  =)

What a great birthday gift!  We finally got a hold of our Twitter account @listia Hooray!  For the most part if you were following us before this should all just be automatic.  @listiainc is now extinct.  Tweet you later!

So today is the day that Listia has been officially launched for a full year.  For some reason we mark “launching” as the day you hit TechCrunch which is probably the right thing to do.  We’ve come a long long way over the past year and the first thing we’d like to do is thank our users for their continued support and enthusiasm for Listia.  We wouldn’t be here without our users!  If I could I would give each and every one of you a hug.

So to continue my story of our launch day a year ago …

Knowing your site will be featured on TechCrunch is probably better than not knowing.  We had a vague idea that it might hit the day of August 5th, 2009 but we had no idea if and what time it would happen.  Gee and I stayed up all night making sure we had enough server power to handle the load and also made sure everything on the site was intact.  By morning I think the article had been published and our servers seemed to be doing fine (I think we overdid it).  I went on a McDonald’s run as we continued to watch our site and read all the comments … good and bad.  By 11AM it was time for some Cicero’s Pizza and we were exhausted so we took turns napping.  Gee and I have a lot of experience with all nighters in college preparing for those exams, so we knew our limits.  We saw some pretty cool auctions listed and some good activity on the site.  We definitely learned a lot from user feedback and found things we had to change right away.  By early evening traffic died down a bit and we finally called it a day … and here we are one year later.  I can’t say that was our last all nighter over the past year, but that’s what makes startups fun right?

Over the past year we’ve been eating, sleeping and breathing Listia.  We’ve had a lot of touching comments from some of our users that say Listia has really changed their community during these hard economic times.  Some users were able to give their kids some nice presents for Christmas that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.  Isn’t that awesome?  When I read some of those things I really felt like we made a difference in a few people’s lives … and that felt really good, I hope we can continue to do so.

The future of Listia is going to be AWESOME.  It’s hard to express the excitement we have for the next year, but you’ll have to trust us and stay tuned.  All the feature requests you have submitted are written down on a long list … don’t worry we’re reviewing each one.  Our small office is just getting set up, but hopefully we’ll need to move some place bigger within the year.  Gee and I can’t wait to get rolling on a lot of this stuff.

Be sure to check out the site today for a bunch of Rewards Auctions.  Give us a little time to take care of those auction wins cause we have a bunch to sort through today.  =)  Once again, thank you to all of our users for making this year outstanding.  Let’s make the next one even better!

It has been one heck of a year for Listia as we approach our 1 year birthday coming up on August 5th.  It was almost a year ago Gee & I pulled an all nighter to make sure our site stayed alive for our TechCrunch launch.  We had McDonald’s at 5AM and Cicero’s Pizza at 11AM taking turns napping for 10 minutes at a time to stay sane.  I’ll save more details for a post on the actual day, but just wanted to let everyone know that our birthday is coming up!  Maybe we’ll have some surprises for our awesome users.  =)