Taking Swicki for a spin
One of the topics Shel and I discussed in show #98 yesterday of The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast was Swicki.
Shel's been experimenting with this new search engine on his blog and thinks it's pretty good. So I decided to give it a try and see for myself how good it is.
My first question is - what is it and how is it different to normal search? From the website:
A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you're interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.
Sounds promising.
Creating a swicki for this blog that's running on TypePad was very easy - you don't need access to the templates, just create it in a new TypeList. You can see it here in the right-hand column a couple of clicks down.
If you use it, do let me know what you think of it. I'll be doing the same.
I created a healthcare information technology (health IT) Swicki on my http://www.hitsphere.com aggregation site. It seems to work pretty well. However, the Swicki guys don't have statistics available yet so we can't tell who's exactly searching for what yet. They've got a great "compare with Google" feature that shows the Swicki is better than Google for most searches related to healthcare IT. All in all, I'd say our response has been pretty positive.
Posted by: Shahid N. Shah | 30 December 2005 at 22:32
not impressed - will see if it gets any better
Posted by: Dennis Howlett | 03 January 2006 at 02:32