Swicki Anyone?

Niche search is a fascinating area.
A lot of people seem to think that Google IS the answer to all your searching needs, whereas I would tend to think that it is just part of the answer.
GoogleBot (or Slurp) cannot always tell the difference between a keyword rich splog and a keyword rich website.
It’s for this reason that I believe human edited directories still play an important role.
If you went looking on Google for a directory of recycling companies in Ireland you might not have found anything, whereas a search on search.ie would have led to success. Not that I’m biased 🙂
So what’s with this Swicki thing?
I’m still not 100% sure how well this service works, but I really like the concept, as it’s pretty much idiot proof.

You setup the swiki with some basic information and a few keywords / phrases and tell it where it should go to find the results. If you restrict it to your own site, like I’ve done in my sidebar, it will be ready to use within seconds.
As people use your mini-search engine it’s designed to learn and you can control which sites / URLs are given a higher priority listing.
I’ve put another one on the James Bond site if you want to see a slightly different use.
An interesting aspect of the search results pages is that they are setup as adsense revenue share, but you can choose from several other common monetisation solutions including Chitika.
Play with it a bit – it’s actually quite good fun 🙂