Eurekster, founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco has come out with its product Swicki, a customizable search portal and widget. Eurekster is a leader in the area of custom and content-discovery technologies.
The main concept swirls around providing a search engine that is customized to the community it is serving. Leveraging the patented technology, communities get to define several filters and parameters which define the content crawled and listed by the engine.
Along with these, the technology also leverages user submitted data, algorithms that refine search by observing user behavior, and metrics of the search terms used.
Here’s how it works: Swickis scan the data indexed by multiple search feeds plus all additional sources specified by the swicki builder to provide relevant results.
The swickis take into account keyword, clicks, votes and behavior recorded from every search, so the search results ranking constantly changes. Swickis also automatically update themselves based on the user’s online behavior.
Social searching, as the mode of search that Eurekster’s Swicki models, is about bringing the human element to search. Few days I back I covered an engine called Yoople that allowed users to modify the rankings of results. Eurekster now lets community model the whole engine itself.
Already many search widgets tailored to specific verticals have taken off with the Swicki. The model could be a hit with publishers looking to bring specific content to their readers.
Instructions to build a Swicki are available here.
Swicki competes with Google’s Custom Search Engine and Yahoo’s Search builder. Is this the emergence of the era of Search 2.0 – Social powered Search?
