If you check my blog, you will see a new search box and tag cloud on the right hand side. It is a swicki powered by Eurekster, a new product which has just been launched at Blogon 2005 – and yes, it is in beta.
What is a swicki ? It is a community-powered focused search. Like Rollyo, one has the ability to create a search engine only using only a specified set of sources. You can also specify a set of keywords describing your interest/business, which are in turn used in a tag cloud.
I have created an Early Stage Venture Capital swicki, including all the VC blogs in my blogroll as sources. And my keywords are the tags displayed on the back of my new business (tag)card, describing what I am interested in. The initial tag set is augmented by the search terms submitted to the engine.
Whilst the current implementation is sort of one way (I select the sources and the keywords), the tool will be eventually enhanced to integrate feedback from the community to influence the results.
You can find out more about swickis on this FAQ page.
PS: The swicki seems to only search my site… for now. It turns out that I made an error when setting up the swiki, misunderstanding that web searches were restricted to the URLs I selected and that I had to include these to get the intended result. The explanation came in an e-mail from the VP of Engineering of Eurekster who also explained that the search engine was changing the ranking of results based on user clicks, electing to promote the posts that are clicked upon to a higher position.
Thanks for the note, Julian!
Tag: blogon