New Eurekster Features Dramatically Enhance Search Results Through User Collaboration and Participation

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Wednesday, February 14, 2007; 02:39 AM

Collaborative "Social" search is taking a giant leap forward as Eurekster, Inc., a pioneer and leader in community-driven, social search and monetization, taps further into the collective intelligence of millions of online users. Eurekster is releasing a set of enhancements to their Swicki customized learning search engine that increase the ease and number of ways users can participate in online search, generating added value for publishers as well as for their audience communities.

“As strong and successful as general search has been over the last years, there has been increasing momentum in enabling publishers and users to collaborate to provide more relevant and targeted search — somewhat known as social search. The challenge for most has been how to provide an easy and scaleable way for users to contribute their expertise and passion for a certain area of interest,” said Eurekster co-founder and CEO Steven Marder. “Our Swicki (search plus wiki) platform has always allowed users to contribute and collaborate just through their implicit activity; today, with the launch of these new features that allow for Q&A, voting and posting comments, we now make it really easy for users to contribute their vertical, social or local oriented expertise and really emphasize the wiki in Swicki.”

Eurekster has established a powerful – and proven – system for managing and vetting distributed community-generated content in a search-based paradigm. Eurekster is now further empowering users to fine-tune search results, providing context and relevancy to searches and strengthening the relationships between publishers and users. With the addition of these additional wiki- and community-based features, users will now be equipped with tools to positively impact swicki search results with simple actions such as polling, commenting and contributing. With these new features, Swicki owners can now easily collaborate with their community to assemble the best information and resources for a given topic.

Collaborative Search Results

Swicki publishers now have an open dialog through which they can directly ask users for information or comments on the search results they are generating. Further, users can ask or answer specific questions and contribute directly to the body of knowledge by writing posts into the search engine that are displayed directly on the results page. Users can also share their unique expertise by authoring entries without ever leaving the search results page, and can add an avatar or thumbnail beside their entry. Swicki moderators can easily see ‘frequently asked questions’ and answer them directly in their own search results, giving them more control and a stronger voice in their own search engine. Each of these tools helps to increase the value delivered with each search, and makes the Web publisher’s site more appealing for potential advertisers.

“The idea of using existing search technologies to build bigger, faster, fresher indexes has not lead to greatly improved search results, because people only find what they want 60-80 percent of the time,” said Grant Ryan, co-founder and Chief Scientist for Eurekster. “We want to fill the 20-40 percent void by automatically highlighting gaps in the search results and making it easy for communities that care about a topic to fill in the answers. What makes these Swicki enhancements significant is that it’s a natural next step in personal publishing on the web and has the ability to make a huge improvement in the quality of search engine results.”

Democratization of Relevance

As has been demonstrated on sites like YouTube, Hot-or-Not and myriad others, one-click voting is a proven method to encourage user participation. Now, user polling in support of (or opposing) the relevance of specific search results is gathered with one-click AJAX voting, altering the placement of a post in the results. The vote tally is an aggregate of implicit and explicit votes, with the vote total visibly displayed to reflect the importance of every vote cast. This polling enables people to easily benefit from the experience of previous users’ searches and more quickly find the results they seek.

Swicki Momentum Builds

Eurekster revolutionized search with the introduction of the Swicki, the next generation of search engine, providing personal and small-business Web publishers a sophisticated with tool for delivering a great end-user experience, building visitor loyalty and supporting a community of users that has tremendous appeal to advertisers. Swickis automatically learn from search behavior – without collecting or identifying individual user information – to deliver the most relevant and valuable content and advertising to each specific Swicki community. Because it benefits site visitors, site publishers and advertisers, Eurekster’s introduction of the Swicki represents a significant increase in the value of online content and advertising.

To date, more than 16,000 Web publishers have built more than 46,000 Swickis in over 15 countries.

Publishers are invited to create their own Swickis with the Eurekster SwickiBuilder at http://swicki.eurekster.com.

About Eurekster, Inc.

Eurekster, Inc. (www.eurekster.com) is a pioneer and leader in community search technologies that harness the knowledge and behavior of online communities to increase search relevance and value for site visitors, site publishers and advertisers. Eurekster SwickiBuilder and Eurekster SwickiPublisher leverage the company's patented technology and patent-pending processes that link search algorithms to social networks and communities of interest. Eurekster SwickiBuilder gives small or individual site publishers the ability to create their own search engines, while Eurekster SwickiPublisher is an enterprise-level platform for delivering a highly customized, branded search feature on large websites. Eurekster, Inc. is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California.