Eurekster
Encyclopedia
Eurekster is a company founded in Christchurch, New Zealand
Christchurch
Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the country's second-largest urban area after Auckland. It lies one third of the way down the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula which itself, since 2006, lies within the formal limits of...
, with an office located in San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
, that builds social search engines
Social search
Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the search query...
for use on websites, the search engines are called swicki
Swicki
Swicki is a collaborative social search engine produced by the company Eurekster. Swicki is based on social networking and relies on 'interest groups', i.e. for each topic it has a number of user-selected sites. You can join a community that matches your interest or rate a particular resource listed...
s (search plus wiki).
Launching to the public on 21 January 2004, Eurekster hosts around 100,000 swickis for various websites, which total approximately 20 million searches per month, or around 800,000 searches per day.
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban is an American business magnate and investor. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network HDNet....
on Blog Maverick explained the swicki: "Add their search engine to your site. They will rank results based on what actions people who search from your site take... and show results that maximize relevance to the sites' community."
According to their chief executive officer, Steven Marder: "Eurekster pioneered vertical, social search..."
The co-founder and chief scientist of Eurekster is Dr. Grant Ryan, who is also the co-founder and chairman of Christchurch-based company, SLI Systems
SLI Systems
SLI Systems is a privately owned company that sells site search software for large content-based e-commerce websites. It was founded in 2001 by people from New Zealand and America. The acronym part of the company name stands for Search, Learn and Improve, which refers to the way the software learns...
, who specialize in search engines that learns from the users.
In May 2006, Red Herring
Red Herring (magazine)
Red Herring was a technology business magazine, which flourished during the dot com boom, with global distribution and bureaus in Bangalore, Beijing, and Paris. It also sponsored conferences designed to bring venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and technologists together. But the magazine went into...
selected Eurekster as one of their favorite companies that push the technological limits in North America. Marder told WebProNews, "We are honored to have been selected by Red Herring for this prestigious award that serves as a testament to Eurekster's vision, technology and business model."
Eurekster was, on 17 January 2007, announced one of the 100 best companies by AlwaysOn Media 100. The selection was made by focusing on "innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value creation, and media attention or 'buzz'"