Web Swamii Provides Online Guidance
Natali Del Conte
16 comments »
Kalem Fletcher wanted to call his company Yoda.com because he believes that he has created the all-wise search site. Unfortunately, Yoda.com has to do with someone’s freakish cat so Fletcher came up with the name Swamii.com instead.
A swami is a Hindu religious teacher. Swamii is a customizable search engine that gives users updates on any Web-related activity around a given search parameter.
Users can set as many as 10 keywords or key searches that they’d like updates on. They can search terms like “Star Wars” or parameters like “Star Wars NOT Star Trek.” Swamii will perform the searches regularly and give results, flushed out by news, blogs, peer to peer sites, web videos and multimedia, television, and job pages. Users can login to see updates on their set searches or have them emailed at a given time interval.
Setting up regular search and news alerts isn’t a new thing but Swamii’s searches are the most comprehensive we’ve seen so far. Google Alerts and Spotback only search news results but both will email you results. Fletcher believes that Swamii’s search algorithms are superior to both but said that the most difficult parts in designing them was making sure that results filtered out unwanted items.
“Typical search engines deal with relevance by eliminating the ‘time’ factor,” Fletcher said via IM today. “The challenge with Swamii was actually focusing on the time factor (i.e. what’s new) but not giving too much irrelevant stuff - its a fine balance.”
Swamii went public on Wednesday and since then has had 1,500 user sign ups. Fletcher and his two partners self-funded the operation, which is headquartered in London.
The site is not dependent on banner ads for revenue, which is a good thing because their Amazon.com advertisement (on the screenshot below) has a bug which only advertised UK promos and pricing to me here in San Francisco. All other ads were geographically appropriate and search results are supposed to be location-based as well. Swamii also makes money if users purchase certain products that come up in their results.
Swamii was designed for the hobbiest searcher but the company also designed Swamii Business for more serious monitoring.
As far as I can tell, there is just one thing that is missing from Swamii that would make it more comprehensive and decidedly Web 2.0. That one thing is the social element. I only see what is being published online but there is no recommendation of what else I should read or see from others with similar interests. But then again, if the Swamii knows everything, why would I need that?
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It is refreshing to see another search engine.
Adding a social network component to Swamii is a great idea.
Can you imagine chatting with people around the world who
did the same search as you. The app. would have auto translate install
based on user profiles.
like it
agree - social networking component would be good
the tv stuff rocks!
Very cool. I wasn’t expecting much when I first looked at it, but actually it’s refreshingly different. Seems to get a lot of decent results on whatever topic I throw at it.
Well worth a look.
It’s there any opportunities for the new search engine in the market? I am running the new type search engine too in China, but I got a lot of negative comments about it. I really wonder how come another miracle would not appear, even the google, when they launched their site at first, less people gave them courage, but now, these silly ones are buying google’s stock.
As I got the negative comments again last week, I wrote a blog, I want to write down the whole story about my startup, whatever the business succeed or dead another day. I know I have to go on my way.
The service is under construction right now, we finished 80%, will make all guys here up to date.
Very cool.
Although, Google Alerts doesn’t just do news… it also emails you on blog and web activity if you want it to.
This is definetly an innovative new idea. Best of luck to them. I am sure this article will help drive significant new traffic to their site.
Pretty cool concept! Loved it. I created a couple of “interests” to give it a shot over the course of the next few days.
I like it, but it doesn’t offer enough flexibility.
For example, if you search for the term “HTML” you get any file that includes “.html” in the file name (and that’s most of them) - which somewhat defeats the purpose. Even if it only includes files that mention other file names in the document, that would still not be what I was looking for. I want it to be case-sensitive (in this case at least) and not search the file names - so I don’t get every blog post that is named blogpost.html
But it does seem like a very comprehensive search. It could just use a little more tweaking.
it s a very good idea and a resourcefull website!