Forbes.com Goes Swicki with Eurekster

Eurekster has announced today that their social search product, SwickiPublisher, will be used to create a new vertical search engine feature on the Forbes.com home page via a tab called “Web” and on the search results pages.

I had the opportunity during the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference to talk about Eurekster with CEO, Steve Marder. Unfortunatley, I did not get a chance to write about that meeting during the conference, so I’ll include some of the things he shared here.

What is most interesting to me about Eurekster’s site search features is that it learns by analyzing clickstream data as people use it. Tagging or voting is possible, but not required. Eurekster is based, in part, on the notion of “collective wisdom”, or “wisdom of crowds”, where users’ actions and/or behavior provide information to the search engine on what content is relevant.

Eurekster Swickis can be customized for a site. Popular Science and Techcrunch are good examples of SwikiPublisher integration. Online Marketing Blog uses the self-serve Eurekster Swiki tag cloud feature in the right side column to give readers another way to find content that is of interest. There is also a stand alone online marketing Swiki.

Publishers can also monetize their Swickis, choosing from any of several different advertising programs such as Google AdSense or Chitika. You can also suggest an advertising program. Online reporting of ad performance and ad requests are easily available.

Future enhancements may include reputation building options and there has been some very beta testing of domain name parking.