Swicki is a new term that I first encountered on a Phil Bradley's blog post. I had to do some further investigation and apparently Swicki is a new type of collaborative search product by Eurekster that allows you to customize your search results. More simply it is a customizable search that can be used on your website or to create a search about a specific niche. Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch about Swicki and coined the term "hyper-contextual search results" to explain the customizable search functionality. Eurekster believes Swicki's will help to create more relevant search results thus allowing ads that are targeted to those results to be more relevant thus increasing click-through and ultimately revenues.
In the article Step by Step Eurekster Swicki Tutorial-Make Your Own Search Engine Wendy Boswell of About.com takes you through the process of creating your Swicki search which you could add to your website or to your weblog for example. I am going to have to dabble with it to see if I can add a community powered Swicki to Somewhat Frank similar to the one created here on Search Engine Watch . I think the "hot search" cloud feature adds value to the search and helps to give users search new ideas.
For additional buzz about Swicki check out these posts on elsua.net, Micro Persuasion and Fresh Blog .
