Introduction - Publish your own search engine
October 20, 2005
The purpose of this blog is to explain what swicki's are and to provide help to those creating and using swicki's.
A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you're interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.
Search is a publishing platform because it is a tool for accessing content. We do not believe just a handful of organizations can organize all of the information out there (we know we can't!). What we have done is created a tool that allows anyone to publish a search engine on any topic so they can apply their wisdom and knowledge to share with everyone. If you are passionate about butterflies you can create a web page, write a blog and now you can publish a search engine that is totally focused on just butterflies. This is a natural extension for any community website or blog as it provides a great new service and in the long term a revenue stream.
We are trying to create a new form of publishing on the web and no doubt we'll make few mistakes on the way. We always welcome your feedback so let us know what you think and we will do what we can to improve the product.
Thanks in advance.
Grant Ryan
Chief Scientist