At our SMX Social Media Marketing conference this week, we had a great panel on the future of human powered search. Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Jimmy Wales of Wikia Search, and Steven Marder of Eurekster all took part. Jason had some remarks on SEO that set off the usual wave of upset. But as I commented to those who weren't at the panel, by the end of Q&A, Jason -- along with Jimmy Wales and Seven Marder -- were agreeing about the usefulness of SEO. It's all down to the definitions. Below you can hear Jason's presentation yourself, then you can hear the Q&A portion that covered search [...]

Related Topics: Search 4.0 | Search Engines: Eurekster | Search Engines: Mahalo | Search Engines: Search Wikia | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | SEM Industry: Community | SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: General

Eurekster started life in 2004 as a "personalized search engine" for consumers. How ahead of its time the company was. The idea was to provide a layer of "social search" results on top of the general results. In late 2004 the company announced a partnership with Friendster, then the hot social network, for social search among registered Friendster users that would rank results according to relevance as determined by your network. Since that time, the company has evolved into something more complex and interesting than a pure "social search" engine such as Mahalo, which is a kind of return to [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Eurekster | Search Engines: Social Search Engines

Eurekster, the social-vertical search engine, has introduced some new features that make its flagship product Swickis more social. Swickis are social site-search widgets. Eurekster has added "Q&A" functionality to Swickis and the ability for site users to add links directly into the site's index. And you can now vote on the relevance of any result in the site/Swicki index. Here's a Swicki search result for "Danny Sullivan" on TechCrunch, for example. At the top of the search results page are links to modules where you can ask a question of the site's user community or add a result to the d [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Eurekster | Search Engines: Social Search Engines

Eurekster have quietly rolled out some interesting improvements on their swicki system. Swickis are search engines created by individuals and used by groups which learn from their users and deliver more focused and targeted results. There are currently over 40,000 swickis in operation on websites and weblogs, with over 13,000 unique publishers, delivering 21,000,000 searches in November, according to Steven Marder (Eurekster CEO), who I spoke to earlier this week. The improvements to the service allow much greater input from each swicki user community, to let publishers leverage the knowledge [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Eurekster | Search Engines: Social Search Engines