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The web can be a bit like Marmite sometimes, with seemingly infinite techno jargon making its way into our dialogue with every passing day, you either have to ‘love it or hate it’. Todays word of interest is Swicki which I guess sounded good to the creator because its a bit like WIKI and search but not whats it all about?

‘Swicki’ is the name of a search tool from social search company Eurekster. Basically it enables a webmaster to create a Eurekster search box that is biased (initially pre-determined) towards particular subjects or specific websites that are of most relevance to the community visiting the website. Over time the Swicki learns which terms are most commonly being searched for and which pages are most often clicked through to in the results page - adjusting future search results accordingly. This ‘assumed relevance’ provides better results suitable to the community as a whole.

This should make search more useful since it is based around collective user experience and is undoubtedly the next step for popular search. Of course such an idea isn’t new, community based search tools have been around for many years,however with more and more ‘non-geeks’ engaging in social networking activities it would seem logical that now is the dawn of social search.

The ‘collective user experience’ principle behind a tool such as Swicki isn’t far removed from social bookmarking applications such as NPG’s Connotea or del.icio.us. The key difference is that it’s got more chance of providing high volumes of shared data because the data is collected automatically. On the flipside manual tagging / bookmarking of content by people using tools like Connotea, whilst providing lower volumes of shared data, would arguably provide links that are still of a higher quality in terms of relevance.

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