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Promoting your swicki widget is one of the best ways to promote your swicki. In addition to adding it to your site, you can add your widget to widget galleries such as Widgetbox. Many bloggers and site developers come to Widgetbox looking to add content to their sites. In addition, Widgetbox powers external widget galleries on sites such Piczo and Typepad.

We're always keeping an eye out for swicki builders that are doing a little extra to promote their swickis and have thus come up with a list of some of the most popular swickis listed on Widgetbox. As you can see, a well-promoted and well-trained swicki within a widget gallery will generate a significant number of subscriptions.

Come find out more about Widgetbox at our freshly-created Widgetbox information page.

Recently, we've seen many swicki builders add their swickis to niche social networks. We've been extremely excited about this development, as among other reasons, users on social networks are ready to make contributions, which is a key component to swicki technology. As more users make contributions to swickis, both in the form of voting and in the form of comments, swickis become an increasingly powerful search tool.

Coming across so many of these niche social networks made us realize that we needed a social network of our own, dedicated entirely to people who have built swickis. Hence, with a little help from our friends at Ning, we built the network swicki shoutouts. This network is a great place for swicki builders to share what they have learned while building, training, and promoting their swickis. With over 100,000 swickis being built to date, there should be plenty of knowledge to go around.

Even if you don't want to join the community, there are plenty of tips in the forum that will help you train and promote your swicki. In many cases, making a few tweaks to how you've trained your swicki, or taking a few minutes to make sure you've promoted your swicki in the right places, can make a huge impact on the success of your swicki.

Come join or browse the community now at shoutouts.swicki.com

We're happy to let you know that our service has been fully restored and all your swickis should be back up and running again. Again, sorry for any inconvenience and thank you so much for your patience with us! In case you experience any further issues, please contact us at swickifeedback (at) eurekster.com or visit our user network swicki shoutouts.

Some swickibuilders are experiencing problems logging in or creating and deleting accounts. We are aware of the issue and are working hard to solve it. We are hopeful it should be resolved by the end of the week. As always, we are working hard to stabilize and improve the service so please let us know if you have any additional issues, questions or suggestions by emailing us at swickifeedback (at) eurekster.com

Thanks again for everyone's patience in resolving this issue.

As mentioned in our previous blog post, some swicki builders were experiences problems with logging in and out of their accounts. This bug is now fixed. Thanks again everyone for your patience with this matter.

Identified late last week, especially by many of the swicki builders who have written us over the weekend, swicki searches are currently experiencing a very slow load time.

At first glance, it may appear that searches don't load at all, but as of writing this post, searches are indeed loading.

We understand that this is a critical issue that affects the adoption of this technology by your communities. We are working hard to fix this bug as fast as we can.

Sorry for the inconveniences that these circumstances have occurred, and thanks again for writing us with known technology issues.

Per our last post, many swicki builders were experiencing a slow load time with their swickis. This was an identified bug, and is now fixed.

If you still have concerns with the load time of your results pages. Please contact us at swicki.feedback@eurekster.com

When first launched in 2005, the swicki self serve product was one of the first to let anyone build custom search engines. Now, a number of search providers offer custom search tools for developers (Yahoo's BOSS is one of the most recent entries into this market), and now there are plenty of established search destinations for specific verticals.

Unlike every other search product on the market though, swickis add a layer of community behavior to search results. Every search, vote, click, and comment made by a user is recorded by the swicki. This community information is then combined with matching algorithms to serve community powered search results to the next user.

There are two reasons for a web user to return to a swicki. First, a swicki is a verticalized search destination, specializing in a particular type of information. Second, a swicki displays community behavior directly on the results pages, explicitly telling a user which content to view first.

Over the last three years, we've seen developers, bloggers, and webmasters leverage swicki technology to make highly-trafficked swickis around a variety of topics, all of which have also generated significant revenue for their builders.

As niche social networks continue to grow, and as search marketing continues to prove to be one of the most lucrative advertising markets on the web, we're confident that developers will continue to find exciting and lucrative new ways to use swicki technology, and that general web users will continue to adopt specific swickis as destinations for custom search.

Thanks to everyone who has made a swicki over the last three years, and who has continued to use swickis for custom web search. We are currently as excited as ever about our community search product, and hope that you find exciting and helpful ways to leverage this technology as well.

If you have any further question or concerns about the product, please don't hesitate to email us.

Would you like to work on one of the largest music destinations on the Web and help us build new and innovative music services for millions of users all over the world? Yahoo! Music is looking for rock-star engineers for its Front End Web Development team in Santa Monica, California. If you’re really good with PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, have great design and engineering skills and are exited by working with a talented team on killer user experiences please consider applying!

More info about this position and how to apply can be found here.

Do you have an incredible passion for music and spend most of your time online? Yahoo! Music is also looking for a talented, initiative-oriented, creative, music programmer for daily video/radio programming and site publishing. The position would be responsible for programming and maintaining new and catalog music/videos, securing exclusive content, increasing user engagement by helping to conceptualize and publish amazing music experiences and communicating regularly with record labels and various content partners.

More info about this position and how to apply can be found here.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

-Alex Sirota, Yahoo! Music