Eurekster Swicki Blog

Folks - it's about time we took down the beta shingle from our logo. Why? We launched the swicki platform two years ago with a clear vision, and slowly but surely we've grown the platform to fulfill that vision. Swickis now do what they are supposed to:

Allow anyone to create and maintain a vertical, topically focused search engine.

And we're not talking about site search here - we're talking build a web search engine that finds the most relevant content published by anyone, and place advertising alongside that content to produce a viable business for the swicki's owner. The new search engine business model quite distinct from the old publishing model.

Inspired by the elegance and success of blog platforms in enabling non-HTML-saavy users to create their own online publication, we knew we could empower non-Python-saavy users to own their own search engine. So that's what we did. The original swickibuilder allowed anyone to create a search engine in 3 easy steps, and that was good.

But when we looked at what the builders had created, we found that there were tweaks here and there that would vastly improve their swickis. We also saw that the work necessary for builders to maintan their community-driven swicki was too time consuming. What we had was a good, but obviously beta product. We listened to the feedback from our builders and members and we saw that we needed to focus on making sure that:

1. the swickis builders made were the best they could be
2. the swickis were always getting better, automatically

We validated many of our assumptions along the way, and learned plenty more. Big and little things, like:

• There is certainly a market for topical vertical search engines - the public has created over 100,000 of them, and over 9 million users searched them monthly.
• Improving search results by aggregating the wisdom of crowds around a topic is powerful, but needs to be harnessed and channeled properly. Otherwise, the search engine looses focus.
• Users are more likely to vote or comment on a search result when they see it will immediately impact the experience of a larger audience.
• The spider-based model for indexing web content breaks down when you want to find the freshest content because the spider has to crawl the site a hundred times a day overloading the site's servers.

We took what we learned and reinjected it back into the product, constantly evolving and improving it. So coming out of beta, it's not about any specific handful of features, it's about an evolutionary milestone. But here's a short list of my favorite features that we upgraded for this release:

Building
When you enter a URL in the "my site" field, we check to see if you have blog roll and add those sites to your favorites. We also grab any meta tags from your and your favorite sites and add them to the buzzcloud. You get more relevant sites and more search terms, automatically.

Maintaining focus and improving relevance
With our new relevance algorithm - codename Mobius - we constantly evaluate the search stream against the latest click and voting behavior and automatically favor results and buzzcloud terms that are both relevant and popular.

Freshness
We are now indexing your RSS feed so that your latest stories show up immediately in your swicki. If you entered additional favorite websites when you trained your swicki, we'll index their RSS feeds as well. We place a little timestamp with the publish date next to stories that we find this way.

Grab it!
We make it easy for you to post your swicki's buzzcloud on any number of blog as well as widget distribution platforms. The more searches you drive to your swicki, the better it gets.

Welcome to the new Eurekster swicki: it keeps getting better, and now out of beta. What are the most important features for you? We'd love to hear.

We're in Chicago attending the first-time-round SES Chicago show now run by Kevin Ryan and Kevin Heisler. Still curious about how the new format will be received, but so far, the vibe is good and people I chatted with are quite excited. When we ran into Kevin R., he seemed pleased with the turnout as well.

Steven Marder, our CEO at Eurekster, participated in the "Actionable Social Media" panel, along with folks from BuzzLogic, iCrossing, Search Engine Guide and Wildfire Strategic Marketing. The room was filled to capacity, indicating a pretty strong interest in this track they call "Fundamentals."

Based on the diversity of businesses these speakers represent, it was interesting to see where Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink was guiding the discussions. The agenda promised we'd be looking at "community-driven sites that allow content sharing via tagging and can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic." The question really was how marketers and publishers can leverage social media services and strategies in an appropriate manner.

Todd Parson of Buzzlogic was kicking things off by providing a few impressive numbers on blogging and the huge amount of UGC out there. Did you know 57 million Americans read blogs, 60% of which want to get an opinion? He also brought up the concept of editorial vs. acquired linking, which led to one of the key themes in this talk: authenticity.

Adam Lavelle of iCrossing talked about how we were "social animals" who use content to connect, which personal networks make social. His golden rule was "listen and be useful". (Amazingly enough, he did manage to go through 35 slides in under 5 minutes).

Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide elaborated on the different benefits of image tagging, specifically using flickr as an example, such as a deeper level of community engagement, as well as traffic growth.

Tamara Kremer of Wildfire highlighted del.icio.us as an example for social bookmarking and the opportunity for creating a deep and rich resource library to be leveraged for marketing efforts.

To wrap up, Steven outlined the change in media from 1.0 to social media, and search 1.0 (such as Google, Yahoo and Ask), and the next iteration: Social Search. He described how social search leverages the characteristics of social media, such as de-centralization, participation, and such, and how this allows for the publisher to create a guided and branded, yet community-powered search experience. Best of all, Eurekster swickis can be built for free and actually make you some money, as Anne clarified after Steven's intro.

When asked about what mistakes were being made, the key concepts discussed in this panel were re-iterated: stay authentic, focus on the conversation, don't think of this as a quick fix, and, as Steven pointed out and Anne reinforced: R-E-S-P-E-C-T your customer.

Eurekster is currently nominated for two prestigious Web awards: Mashable.com's Open Web Awards and The Crunchies Awards. You can vote for us by clicking on any of the below links, which will take you to the voting pages.

The Crunchies Finalist Nominations:

1. Best International Start-up
2. Best User-Generated Content Start-Up
3. Best in Internet Technology and Innovation

Mashable Open Web Awards Winner Nominations:

1. Favorite Social Search Site

Thanks to all who have already voted!

We appreciate all the hard work swickibuilders have poured into their swickis over the past two years while we were in beta. Over that period we experimented and played with a lot of ideas and tactics, and so did our builders.

Most of the swickis we see being built are great - focused and trained on an interesting topic, aimed at surfacing meaningful and relevant content to an existing or growing audience. We are honored and excited to share them with the world.

Now that we have left the petri-dish-that-is-beta, the quality and relevance of the swickis that we host is more important to us than ever. Irrelevant, abusive, neglected or otherwise malicious swickis are not only a poor use of our product, they tarnish the reputation of swickis everywhere.

So to help the great swickis really shine, starting today we are more strictly enforcing our terms and conditions and are extending our initial swicki review cycle to a program of regular editorial reviews.

Only swickis that continue to meet our standards of quality and relevance will be shown in our directory, enabled to show custom HTML to their swicki templates, or activate revenue sharing.

We are also adding a link to all swickis allowing users to flag them to our reviewers as abusive or spam. We have always immediately deleted swickis that we find abusive, malicious or just plain spammy.

If you feel that your swicki has been unfairly affected by our policy, please contact us.