Eurekster Swicki Business Internet Marketing

Eurekster Swicki is located in San Francisco, California. The company traces its beginnings back to Globalbrain.net, which was founded in 1998 by Dr. Grant Ryan (Ryan currently resides as Eurekster’s Chief Scientist). After an acquisition by NBCi and a repurchase by the original team in 2001, Globalbrain.net went on to become S.L.I. systems. In 2003, S.L.I. formed Eurekster, which is currently still in beta.

Eurekster takes a unique approach to providing search results. As a subscriber, you get to create your own customized search page that focuses on the results you want. You can develop a stand alone search page from pre-designed templates, or publish a search section to your current website.

With Eurekster, you supply your own keywords and phrases centered on a theme for the community you are catering to. For instance, if you run a flower shop business, you can tailor your search phrases to flower-centric terms. These terms become part of your ‘buzz cloud,’ and they are listed at the front of your site, or swicki. Furthermore, you can set up your site to specifically search or avoid certain websites for these terms. The intent is to provide community search sites that are focused.

Your Eurekster search site learns from user behavior. Eurekster labels this swicki, a term borrowed from wiki, because the site can be modified by your community of users. Eurekster’s algorithm weighs user behavior and adds/ranks relevant results to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), based on the keywords and phrases used. For instance, if your swicki is new, and the first user that comes to the site searches for roses, then visits a page that’s all about roses, that site is added to the top of the SERP for the next user. Moreover, popular search phrases used by your community are added to your swicki’s ‘buzz cloud.’

The level of collaboration will be controllable. Eurekster is currently implementing options so you can set the level of influence on your swicki, in order to specify who has control and who does not.

Eurekster is not a stand alone search engine. Instead, it gathers results through Yahoo Search. This is somewhat limiting, but perhaps in the future Eurekster will operate with other search engines to provide a wider range of results.

Currently, Eurekster is a free service. The company earns capital by placing paid results within the SERP.