Have you heard of swickis?

I came across the concept on eurekster’s site while browsing the Net for new search engine information – more specifically for some information I need about blogs. 

Swickis are a ” new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you’re interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.”

and

“Swickis allow you to build specific searches tailored to your interests and that of your community and get constantly updated results from your web or blog page. Swickis scan all the data indexed in Yahoo Search, plus all additional sources you specify, and present the results in a dynamically updated, easy to use format that you can publish on your site – or use at swicki.com” (copied from eurekster’s site -link given above)

Wendy Boswell provides a tutorial on setting up a swicki at her site.

Swickis sounds intriguing, and although the software is a beta version at the moment, Eurekster are working to ensure continuing improvements. Another quote from their site “…We also collect and organize information about all public swickis in our Directory. Whether you have built a swicki or not, you can come to the swicki directory and find swicki search engines that interest you “.

 It sounds really interesting, particularly for those of us that are involved in finding targeted information and have been hearing about intuitive methods used to select information.