Site-specific search provider Eurekster is today releasing a new version of its Swicki product that features a set community features on its results and home pages.

The free Swicki search widget, used here on TechCrunch in the right-hand column, provides a cloud of popular search terms and leads to a page with results voted on by users and optionally collected from related sites.

The new version attempts to bring even more attention to the site-specific Swicki community built around search. The following components will now show up on the results page: a summary of the most recent comments (users can comment on search results) and a list of the top Swicki comment contributors. On the Swicki homepage for a site (each site that adds the search functionality also gets a community overview homepage), you will now be able to see the top voted search results, a list of the most recent posts, and related RSS feeds.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Swicki search we have here on TechCrunch, since I prefer to see just a reverse chronological list of the posts related to my search term, not a list weighted by user votes. If you search “facebook”, for example, the first result comes from March 2006 and not terribly relevant anymore.

However, I can understand why community-based search is useful for less newsy sites, such as the home repair example that Eurekster has provided us to the left. For standing resources such as this one, the feedback of the community can be particularly helpful for refining search results, pushing the best to the top. Today’s improvements should help to strengthen that community and encourage participation.

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Eurekster, known for their Swicki community-driven search platform, has just announced $5.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan.

Eurekster’s most popular product product, Swicki’s, are site specific search engines (we’ve included a swicki in our right sidebar for some time). This has turned into a crowded space over the last year or so - Rollyo, Google Co-Op, and Yahoo! Search Builder all have good products.

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As an addendum to our coverage of Google’s new Co-op customizable search product that launched yesterday - Google officially announced the news on their blog today with a post titled “Eureka! Your own search engine has landed!”

I wonder if Shashi Seth and R.V. Guha, the authors of the post, intended to incorporate part of the name of one of the primary existing players in the customizable search space - Eurekster - into the blog post announcing the new product. “Eureka!” is pretty damn close to “Eurekster,” although something tells me this was more of a Freudian slip rather than a conscious jab at a competitor. Either way, it’s an interesting choice of words.

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Eurekster’s Swicki search service officially launches later today (November 16, 2005).

Eurekster, a twenty person company located in San Francisco and New Zealand, has a profitable business (called Search Publisher) that provides customized search results to a number of large websites. Steven Marder, Eurekster’s CEO, tells me Eurekster’s current products are generating 25+ million monthly searches.

With Swickis, they’ve taken the basic technology and added on a “do it yourself” interface to allow a much larger number of sites, particularly blogs, to also integrate search direclty into their content.

Swicki’s are “community powered” in a sense and their website focuses on this.

What is a swicki?

A swicki is 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 certainly the community has a role in creating more relevant results. But what really interests me about their technology is that the tweaking by the publisher along with community actions combine to create extremely contextual, or hyper-contextual (my words, not theirs), search results.

Two somewhat different examples of live Swickis (they’ve been in private beta for a while): see our Web 2.0 Workgroup (scroll down a bit) and Jeff Clavier’s right sidebar.

Swicki’s are based on Yahoo’s search API for base results. The publisher customizes the search engine by adding keywords that are always added to the search results. And, in a similar way to Rollyo, Swickis allow for the publisher to name specific websites that have content relevant to the search. For instance, a gaming site may include other gaming website URLs as important, and Swicki will put results from those sites on the top. A publisher can also block results from certain blogs. For our Workgroup, we selected all participating site URLs as the most relevant content.

Swicki’s also have a related “buzzcloud”, which is a tagcloud of commonly searched terms. The buzzcould can also be edited by the publisher to add or remove terms, and a spam filter disallows any single IP from influencing the buzzcloud results too heavily.

Swickis are completely free. They will soon have contextual advertising served along with normal search results if the publisher chooses, but there will be no penalty or fee if they publisher wishes to keep advertising out. They are also adding analytics to allow publishers to monitor search statistics.

A press release should be out soon and I’ll link to it once it’s available. Check out their blog as well for a post.

Brian Benzinger posted a long review of Swickis last month when they first went into private beta. Thanks Susan for introducing me to the company.

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