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 marketing and human powered search. Note that the video production could be better. Hey, I just got a Macbook — it’s my first time playing with what it can supposedly do. Do don’t hassle me over the titles that could be better. Also, I will get the entire session up with the presentations from Jimmy and Steven, along with the further Q&A. But first, Jason:

The Q&A:

And here’s some of the reaction to initial reports of his comments, before anyone not at the show could hear what he said in full:

• My Plea to SE Conferences: Turn Calacanis Away, Eric Lander
• My Plea to SE Conferences: Turn Calacanis Away, Sphinn discussion on post above
• Why Calacanis Should Not Be Allowed to Speak at Conferences, Slightly Shady SEO
• Why Calacanis Should Not Be Allowed to Speak at Conferences, Sphinn discussion on post above
• Jason Calacanis has pissed off SEO’s… again. Seriously., Sphinn
• Srsly are SEOs Really That Easy To Manipulate?, ShoeMoney

And here’s further coverage of the show (for initial coverage from the first day, see SMX Social: Mahalo To Do Microformats, Search Wikia Adds Alpha 0.2 Features & More):

• 20 Take-Aways from SMX Social Media – Scott Clark, Scott Clark
• Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM, BruceClay.com
• Micro Communities, BruceClay.com
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing, BruceClay.com
• Social Media Expo (SMX) Report from Long Beach, California, Wpromoter
• SMX Social Media Conference in Long Beach, MindCradle
• Rand Fishkin | Jason Calacanis | SMX Social, Gary Pool
• SMX Social Media Coverage Round Up, BruceClay.com
• SMX Social Media Pics, Scott Clark @ Flickr

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 the Yahoo! directory of old. Eurekster sits at the center of several Internet trends, including vertical search, communities, blogging, widgets, and, more recently, video. Today it officially comes out of beta.

The company’s “product” is the Swicki, which Eurekster calls a “custom search portal.” Swickis can be built around any topic, idea, or niche and placed, as a widget, on any blog or site. They offer site search and Web search. But it’s also the case that Swickis are a kind of vertical search engine “in a box” that can be rolled out as stand alone sites. Publishers or bloggers can also add existing Swickis to their sites.

According to the company, over 100,000 Swickis have been created to date. They together capture approximately 25 million search queries monthly. Search results on any individual site change according to users’ explicit voting on results and implicit user behavior (clickstream analysis). Users are also able to add sites to the index. (Web results are drawn from several existing search indexes, as well as Eurekster’s own crawling.)

What the company has created is a distributed social search engine, which has no single entry point. The flip side of this is a very targeted niche ad network that can be sliced and diced by content, as well as other variables. Google is attempting to do the same thing with its Custom Search Engine. In contrast to Google, however, Eurkester has built its network and products in relative obscurity for most people in the industry. But the the company has created a fascinating and many faceted search product that is worth greater attention.

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 database.

Here’s more on the new features from the Eurekster blog.

Simultaneously Eurekster is building a targeted ad network with its widely distributed Swickis. Advertisers can purchase individual sites using Swickis and ultimately (coming soon) categories of Swickis to reach specific audiences.

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 of each community in order to better understand their traffic and drive more searches per swicki. The new features improve relevancy by allowing users to add content to the searches than they have been able to up until now. For example, once a search has been run a user can add information to the search result – perhaps pointing to other sites, making comments about the results and so on by clicking on the ‘write your own result’ button. Users can also ask the community for help by posting a question that the rest of the community can try and answer by using the ‘Ask the community for help’ option. Finally, individual results can be vote for or against. Unsurprisingly the publisher or moderator has complete control over these functions, so the danger of spamming results is kept to an absolute minimum, and people who have not registered can view the results, but can do no more than that.

The improvements are being rolled out now, and you can see examples of them by taking a look at Eurekster’s own swicki, or mine for example; try a search for search engine land and as well as results you’ll see a comment from me.

I think it’s an interesting move towards integrating search into individual communities and is building on already popular concepts such as Q&A resources and user voting. Obviously it’s not something that everyone is going to want to get involved with, although everyone will have some opportunity for getting involved, but without it becoming onerous. Future developments will I’m sure have fine tuning, related searches, lists of questions and so on. There are of course other options available, and I wrote about some of them back in September so I’m looking forward to seeing how they will respond to the challenges set by Eurekster.