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.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)