Eurekster Swicki Blog

I've just finished reading John Battelle's book "The Search" - I guess I must be a complete search geek as I couldn't put it down. I've meet a number of the people John talked about over the years so it made for even more compulsive reading. Fantastic read for anyone even vaguely interested in search or the Internet.

One quote stood out in particular:

Circling back to our goal of perfect search, imagine that nearly every subject worthy of some critical mass of human intent-from archaeology to automobiles, zoology to pop music-receives a GlobablSpec-like vertical search treatments, or perhaps a blog ecology that serves as a useful proxy. Then imagine......hundreds or thousands of domains specific sites. It's not such a leap to imagine, in the end, that we get closer to perfect search through the concerted effort of thousands of smaller sites making their domain more perfect.

This is exactly the aim of swicki's! Give people with domain expertise the ability to create a search engine for their community and allow them to shape and improve the results.

The current product is very much our first guess at the ideal tools for publishing a search engine and they will continue to evolve based on your feedback so keep it coming....

There is an interesting thread discussing swicki's and web 2.0 at Techsoup which posed the question, "What is the problem we are trying to solve with a swicki?"

This is our answer to that question:

Any website or blog has an audience that has some sort of shared interest. As the person running the site or blog your goal is to provide you community with things they find interesting and useful or show something that will earn you money. Swicki's are an interesting combination of these two things. Most importantly a Swicki is a search engine that reflects the unique perspective of your community i.e. over time the results will be more relevant to your community than a general search engine. The buzzcloud also acts as an online water cooler showing what others in the community are interested in.

In addition to providing a useful service this tool will allow the ten’s of thousands of community sites out there to get a share of the multibillion dollar pay per click search market (more details on this coming soon).

The larger problem swicki's are solving is that large search engines are too general and just like every other form of media that starts with the big boys trying to be everything to everyone (NBC, ABC) eventually it splits into lots of niche targeted products (Nickelodeon, History Channel etc). We don’t think any one organization is clever enough to organize all the information on the web in a way that suits every user or community of users so we have developed a tool that allows anyone to moderate a search engine and decide what is and isn’t relevant to their community.

We have tried to make it easy as possible as most of the improvements happen passively based on how your community interacts with the swicki. Feel free to have a go and let us know how we can improve.

Very happy to announce that swickis are officially open to the world today. We'll be in beta for a while as we are rapidly introducing new features and tweaking things every day - please bear with us through the inevitable hiccups.

A couple of good discussions on swickis on:
About.com http://websearch.about.com/od/enginesanddirectories/ss/swicki.htm
Techcrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/

Just like to publicly thank the team here that put this together so quickly. Always a fun process when you put a group of people together from around the world and mix it up (at last count six nationalities). Now it's over to you to tell us what you think and what you want as this product is all about giving you and your users control over the search engines you create. Thanks also to all the earlier beta testers for the feedback and suggestions.

Will be interesting to see where it all leads......