Disclosure: Eurekster is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb
Eurekster has quietly rolled out an
interesting upgrade to their social search service, Swicki. Now users can contribute their own search
answers to a swicki, if they feel they have expertise in the topic. This essentially
makes Swicki into a ‘read/write’ search engine! The owner of the swicki still needs to
approve the answer, so users can’t just write any old thing and have it published. Here
is an example from R/WW’s swicki. I searched for “web office” and this is part of what
displays:
Not only can users promote results (see the vote option above), they can write new
results. When you click “write your own result” (see the first link directly under the
search box), you get a content submission form like this:
It’s kind of a mix between blogging and a wiki – and it’ll be interesting to see how
much take-up it gets.
The general idea is that swickis are a community-driven search engine, so the users
help to decide which results display and in what order. This is one of the many ‘search
2.0’ approaches being explored by multiple startups currently. See Alex Iskold’s excellent
post The Race
to Beat Google for details on other Google wannabes.
