This is a “Swicki.”

What’s a Swicki? It’s an intriguing new variation on the idea of customizable search engines. Before we get to the special wrinkle in Swickis, a word about why publishers should care about customizable search.

Nearly every publisher operates in a narrow niche–covering wine, for example, or travel, or investing, or even dental plans. Publishers have insider knowledge about what topics interest their particular audiences and which Web-based sources are the most authoritative and interesting in their fields. If you could tailor a search engine to comb through only those sites that you specify, you would have a powerful tool to serve the specialized needs of your audience.

Well, there are search engines that you can tailor to your niche in this way. They’re free, as long as you can live with some sponsored text ads on the results page. And you can build them right into your site.

One of the simplest versions of these tools is Rollyo (“roll your own” search engine). Yahoo this week unveiled a slightly more tweak-able tool at its Search Builder sub-site. Their motto: “Build a search engine that your customers can’t find anywhere else.”

Swickis (from San Francisco-based Eurekster.com) up the ante in the custom search engine arms race by adding features that tap the “wisdom of the crowd” and take advantage of other Web 2.0-ish techniques. Users of a Swicki can tag results with their own labels. This enables the Swicki to assemble an archive of categorized searches and to generate a “buzz cloud” of popular results accessible to the entire “crowd.”

Swickis also “learn,” refining their search strategies in reaction to
both active directions from the engine’s creator and passive directions
based on user behavior. As the Swicki site puts it, “Swickis harness
the collective power of your community.”

That’s a critical point for publishers–this is your crowd. Unlike
the mass audience of the Web at large, your users have real expertise
in your niche. So knowing what is popular among their peers is of great value
to individual members of your audience. (The generic search engines and the people who run
them just don’t know your “vertical space” the way you and your users do.)

Any one of these tools offers a relatively easy way to add a branded, “sticky” element to your site. Beyond search, though, smart publishers should think about applying this local customization strategy wherever possible. In other words, identify techniques that work well on the Web at large and adapt them vertically to capitalize on your unique niche.