How do I remove inapproriate searches from my Lijit search cloud?

As you can see by visiting my weblog, I also use the Lijit search widget here on AskDaveTaylor, as well as on my other blogs, and you're right, while it's interesting to get the visual feedback on what people search for on your blog through the search cloud, sometimes it's not what you want your readers to be thinking about!

(The "search cloud", by the way, are the set of searches that appear just below the search box on the right side. Those show a subset of popular searches on the site. It's good in that it helps spark ideas and gets people to think more widely about what material is or might be on the site, but it's bad if they're not congruent with what you want people to consider is your core topic matter)

I have Lijit running on my Attachment Parenting blog and it demonstrates exactly the problem you highlight. If I go and look at the page, check out some of the searches people are doing when they get to the weblog:

Some of the searches, like "pre-teen girls thong", reference articles about how I think that sort of thing is radically inappropriate for children, but other searches, like "spank your wife over" are just plain troubling and are in the "what the $#@$?" category. Both, though, should be masked or removed. I can't control what searches people do on my site, of course, but I can control what's shown in the search cloud.

To edit this result, you need to log in to your account at Lijit. Once you do, you'll see a list of recent searches, which are hopefully less troubling than what I see:

Aww jeez. Not good at all!

It's not at all easy to figure out where you can edit these search results, either. On the navigational menu on the top it's not "content" and it's not "search widget", but rather your "profile" that's the right area:

Click on that and you'll see a list of recent searches:

What we want is the small link at the bottom, "Filter displayed searches". Click on that and here's where you can scrub the results to be more appropriate:

This isn't a great solution because, for example, it would be entirely appropriate to search for "spanking" on a parenting site, but the words "spanking" and "wife" in the same search goes beyond what's okay. There's no way to enter that sort of more sophisticated filter, however.

Nonetheless, better to have an overly broad filter than to have inappropriate searches start to pollute your widget search cloud entirely. Enter the word or words you want to screen out, press "Apply", and your search cloud shoudl change next time you load the widget on your site.

When I add a few filter words and reload my Lijit widget on my parenting blog, here's the result:

Definitely better, though it's sometimes a fine line between filtering out the inappropriate searches and being perhaps a bit overly paranoid about it...

Nonetheless, that shows you how to add "naughty word filters" to your Lijit search widget.