Author Archive

Last night we released a nifty new feature on the results page that allows any user to delete, promote, edit or add search results right from the results page. Now, in addition to the "implicit" votes that users cast by clicking on results, they can vote "explicitly". And because we used magical AJAX tecnology, they can do it without ever leaving the page. Power to the people!

If you are the swicki owner/moderator your votes count instantly. Changes suggested by other users are logged in a queue for moderator approval. Once the moderator OKs the suggestions, they will be seen by the entire community.

This really does enable groups of users to create, share and help each other build fantastic vertical search engines.

In designing the interface, we were careful to avoid peppering the results with what our Creative Director Joy calls "page acne" - repetitive icons or links that you don't use most of the time but make the results illegible. So you only see the icons when you mouseover a specific result, but they keep to the right side, out of the way.

When you mouse over the icons themselves, they then expand and explain what they can do. Clicking on any of them brings up an in-page dialog box allowing you to express your endoresement of an underappreciated result, or dissatisfaction with an irrelevant result. Without having to leave the comfort of the page.

Looks like Red Herring has decided to make our CEO Steven the poster child champion of the publishers' revolt against Google. As you can see, Steven is a head-above-the-clouds, eye-on-the-high-level-vision, benevolently-looking-down-on-us-all sort of executive. He also has a great sense of humor, which he will demonstrate by not firing me for writing the above sentence.

Read the full Red Herring article "Google and Its Discontents" here.

Last week we quietly launched another swicki customization feature - custom header/footer HTML and CSS. This new feature allows you to control the look and feel of the results page of your swicki. Swickis are search engines for your community, and we want you to be able to make them look and feel like your site or blog.

If you look at your swicki list in "My Swickis" you will see a new option labeled "Customize templates" at the top of the right column of options, above "Edit buzz cloud".

On the "customize templates" page, you will see 4 text boxes with the following labels:

• CSS styles will override the default swicki CSS
• Header HTML will be inserted in the shaded header at the top of the page
• Side HTML will be inserted below the swicki buzzcloud on the right of page)
• Footer HTML will be inserted at the bottom of the page, just before the eurekster footer links

To use this feature, you will need a solid grasp of HTML and CSS. For those of you not familiar with HTML and CSS, don't worry - we are working on an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that will allow you to easily control the same elements. We're always interested in what you would find most useful, customization or otherwise, so post a comment or send an email to swickifeedback{at}eurekster.com.

For those interested in learning a bit about CSS and HTML and how we use them in your swicki, i've posted some quick pointers to help you get started in the full blog post...

CSS styles

To change the background color of your swicki, add the following CSS code to the "CSS Styles" box:

html,body { background-color: #6799CB; }

You can replace "#6799CB" with any HTML color such as "red" or "black", as well as any hexadecimal color value. If you aren't familiar with hexadecimal color values, colorschemer provides a useful tool for picking colors and even matching palattes.

To change the header color, add this line to the CSS code, substituting your preferred hex color value.

.swickiHeader { background: #6799CB; }

Swicki classes and CSS properties
We have assigned CSS classes to all of the elements on the swicki results page. The above example refers to the "swickiHeader" class. If you would like to use a background image (such as a gradient or hatch pattern), you can add that using standard CSS.

.swickiHeader { background-image: url(http://yoursite.com/gradient.gif); background-color: #6799CB; }

In fact, you can use any CSS property to control these elements. For a full list of CSS properties,
w3schools has a good reference.

You can apply CSS properties to style pretty much any element on the page.

The header title text:

h1.swickiSearchTitle a:link,h1.swickiSearchTitle a:visited { color: #FFFFFF; text-decoration: none;}

The search button label:

.swickiHeader .searchBtnLabel { color: #FFFFFF}

For a full list of CSS classes we use to style the page, you can review our CSS results page file. The text file lists all of the CSS properties for our default style for all swickis. In addition, based on the color palatte you selected when you customized your swicki, we add CSS properties in the head of the HTML document to that override the default. The "customize template" CSS Styles box, you can override both of these - whatever you enter into the box gets inserted in the head of your swicki results page witin a <style type="text/css"> declaration.

A handy way to apply your site's styles to your swicki is to import the CSS file URL. Simple add this code to the CSS box, substituting the URL of your file:

@import url( http://swicki.eurekster.com/css/results2.css );

One final note - when you save your changes to the "customize template" page, we validate and format your css, so don't be alarmed if your code looks different.

HTML Header/Footer

In addition to styling the CSS of the classes on the page, you can also insert your custom HTML. For security reasons, we don't allow JavaScript, PHP or any other scripting languages - they will get stripped when you save your changes.

The header HTML you enter into the "customize template" page is insterted above the swickiHeader element and above the entire swicki container, but underneath the swicki toolbar. This way you can use a header element that is liquid and spans the entire width of the browser window.

Alternately, if you want to use a header that fits exactly on top of the search box, you need to size it to 800 pixels wide.

When you include header HTML code, we turn off the title of your swicki and the byline to keep the design clean.

I'll post more tips and tricks in the future, but I'll do my best to answer any questions or comments that get posted here.

UPDATE: For a better understanding of the CSS classes we use to control the results page, check out our Swicki CSS Cheat Sheet

Bloggers using WordPress can now add their swickis to their blog as a "WordPress Widget". For those of you new to swickis - a swicki is a highly customizable search engine that learns from your community's search behavior. Here's how to add one to your site:

1. Go to swicki.com. If you have not done so already, create a swicki and register.
2. Go to the "Get Code" page for your swicki. Under "Additional help on how to add to your site or blog," open the entry for "WordPress.org".
3. Copy the settings listed there. You will need them later to configure your widget.
   • GroupKey
   • SecKey
   • Shortname
   • Title
4. Make sure to upgrade your WordPress blog to allow widgets. Details are listed here.
5. Get the PHP code for the Swicki WordPress Widget here.
6. Unzip the zip file
7. Place "swicki.php" in your 'wp-content/plugins/widgets' folder on your WordPress installation.
8. In your WordPress management interface, go to "Plugin Management" an enable the widget.
9. In "Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets" you should see a "Swicki" widget you can now use on your WordPress.org blog!
10. Fill in the details of your Swicki with the settings you copied earlier for
    • GroupKey
    • SecKey
    • Shortname
    • Title
11. Save the changes.
12. Your swicki is ready!

Folks - it's about time we took down the beta shingle from our logo. Why? We launched the swicki platform two years ago with a clear vision, and slowly but surely we've grown the platform to fulfill that vision. Swickis now do what they are supposed to:

Allow anyone to create and maintain a vertical, topically focused search engine.

And we're not talking about site search here - we're talking build a web search engine that finds the most relevant content published by anyone, and place advertising alongside that content to produce a viable business for the swicki's owner. The new search engine business model quite distinct from the old publishing model.

Inspired by the elegance and success of blog platforms in enabling non-HTML-saavy users to create their own online publication, we knew we could empower non-Python-saavy users to own their own search engine. So that's what we did. The original swickibuilder allowed anyone to create a search engine in 3 easy steps, and that was good.

But when we looked at what the builders had created, we found that there were tweaks here and there that would vastly improve their swickis. We also saw that the work necessary for builders to maintan their community-driven swicki was too time consuming. What we had was a good, but obviously beta product. We listened to the feedback from our builders and members and we saw that we needed to focus on making sure that:

1. the swickis builders made were the best they could be
2. the swickis were always getting better, automatically

We validated many of our assumptions along the way, and learned plenty more. Big and little things, like:

• There is certainly a market for topical vertical search engines - the public has created over 100,000 of them, and over 9 million users searched them monthly.
• Improving search results by aggregating the wisdom of crowds around a topic is powerful, but needs to be harnessed and channeled properly. Otherwise, the search engine looses focus.
• Users are more likely to vote or comment on a search result when they see it will immediately impact the experience of a larger audience.
• The spider-based model for indexing web content breaks down when you want to find the freshest content because the spider has to crawl the site a hundred times a day overloading the site's servers.

We took what we learned and reinjected it back into the product, constantly evolving and improving it. So coming out of beta, it's not about any specific handful of features, it's about an evolutionary milestone. But here's a short list of my favorite features that we upgraded for this release:

Building
When you enter a URL in the "my site" field, we check to see if you have blog roll and add those sites to your favorites. We also grab any meta tags from your and your favorite sites and add them to the buzzcloud. You get more relevant sites and more search terms, automatically.

Maintaining focus and improving relevance
With our new relevance algorithm - codename Mobius - we constantly evaluate the search stream against the latest click and voting behavior and automatically favor results and buzzcloud terms that are both relevant and popular.

Freshness
We are now indexing your RSS feed so that your latest stories show up immediately in your swicki. If you entered additional favorite websites when you trained your swicki, we'll index their RSS feeds as well. We place a little timestamp with the publish date next to stories that we find this way.

Grab it!
We make it easy for you to post your swicki's buzzcloud on any number of blog as well as widget distribution platforms. The more searches you drive to your swicki, the better it gets.

Welcome to the new Eurekster swicki: it keeps getting better, and now out of beta. What are the most important features for you? We'd love to hear.

We appreciate all the hard work swickibuilders have poured into their swickis over the past two years while we were in beta. Over that period we experimented and played with a lot of ideas and tactics, and so did our builders.

Most of the swickis we see being built are great - focused and trained on an interesting topic, aimed at surfacing meaningful and relevant content to an existing or growing audience. We are honored and excited to share them with the world.

Now that we have left the petri-dish-that-is-beta, the quality and relevance of the swickis that we host is more important to us than ever. Irrelevant, abusive, neglected or otherwise malicious swickis are not only a poor use of our product, they tarnish the reputation of swickis everywhere.

So to help the great swickis really shine, starting today we are more strictly enforcing our terms and conditions and are extending our initial swicki review cycle to a program of regular editorial reviews.

Only swickis that continue to meet our standards of quality and relevance will be shown in our directory, enabled to show custom HTML to their swicki templates, or activate revenue sharing.

We are also adding a link to all swickis allowing users to flag them to our reviewers as abusive or spam. We have always immediately deleted swickis that we find abusive, malicious or just plain spammy.

If you feel that your swicki has been unfairly affected by our policy, please contact us.