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Eurekster: Personalized Search for Individuals And Groups 
by Shaun Ryan ©Copyright 2004

Eurekster, Inc. launched its personalized search service in 
January: www.eurekster.com. The search results for each 
individual are personalized based on their network of contacts 
and their affiliations. Eurekster also provides a useful new 
sticky "SearchGroups" feature for webmasters to add to their 
site - it is a web search box that focuses search and delivers 
results ranked by what the site's users have found to be useful, 
along with a "What's Hot" sidebar. Eurekster has received rave 
reviews since its release. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch 
(http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3352681) 
recently said, "the only released service I know of that's 
actually actively doing serious search personalization is 
Eurekster." 

As search has evolved over the years the key factors that have 
determined relevance have changed. The first crawlers (Lycos, 
AltaVista) used keyword frequency and meta tags to determine 
relevance. This was fantastic, but as the web grew the number of 
sites increased and people took advantage of this to 
artificially promote their rankings in the search engines. Yahoo 
and Looksmart addressed this by having hand-edited directories 
of the top sites on the net. This reduced the dross and made a 
significant improvement but suffered because it wasn't 
exhaustive. The next major breakthrough came from Google (and 
later Teoma and others) that use link analysis to promote sites 
that have many links pointing to them. The idea is that if 
webmasters think a site is relevant enough to add a link to it 
then it will probably be better than sites that don't have 
links. 

Eurekster makes a further improvement by using your friends, 
colleagues and people who share your interests to improve the 
relevance of standard search engine results. The raw search 
results in Eurekster are provided by Yahoo; Eurekster adds the 
personal and social networking relevancy and personalization to 
make good results better. Effectively, Eurekster is an on-line 
water cooler that allows you to see and share what's happening 
while still maintaining control over privacy. 

Personalized Search Based On Your Social Network

Eurekster personalizes your search results based on people you 
know. You invite your friends and colleagues to join your 
network, and the search activity of your extended network will 
then influence your search results. Quite simply, if you search 
using the same term that someone in your extended network has 
searched for, then the results they clicked on will be at the 
top for you. This is just like real life word of mouth where we 
trust information that has been filtered by friends and 
colleagues.   

Because you have shared interests with your friends and 
colleagues many of the results they find of interest will also 
be of interest to you. 

What's Hot

Another unique feature of Eurekster is the What's Hot Bar on the 
right-side side of the search results page. This bar shows 
recent and popular searches and sites that have been clicked on 
by people in your extended network. This is a way of discovering 
information that you may have otherwise not found. Because 
you are connected to the people who are making these queries 
there is a high chance you will find them interesting. 

The What's Hot bar also allows you to email the people who have 
made the queries. This allows you to contact people who are 
searching for topics of interest to you, if they have opted-in 
to be contactable. The email is sent anonymously, the identity 
of the searcher is only revealed if they chose to respond. 

Personalized Search Based On Groups

Eurekster allows search results to be tailored for a group. 
Anyone can create a Eurekster SearchGroup around any topic. The 
search behavior of members of the group influences the results 
for all the other members. This means that if you create a group 
about fishing then the results for "casting" should be about 
fishing and not Hollywood. 

The moderator can also influence the results - they can promote 
or demote any results. 

The What's Hot bar shows you what people in the search group 
have been searching for and clicking on.  

Adding What's Hot To Your Site

As a moderator of a group you can add a What's Hot bar to your 
site.  This allows you to add a dynamic feature to your site 
that your visitors will find useful and interesting. You can see 
an example of this here: http://www.rugbyheads.com  

Using Eurekster To Promote Your Site 

There are three ways you can get your site listed on Eurekster:
 
1. Buy Overture keywords. The sponsored results shown at the top 
of the Eurekster search results are provided by Overture: 
http://www.overture.com 

2. The web search results are provided by Yahoo (and re-ranked 
by Eurekster). If you are in the Yahoo index you will appear in 
Eurekster. You can submit your site to the Yahoo index here: 
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
 
3. As moderator of a group you can submit your site to that 
group and control which keywords it will appear for searches 
done by people within that group. 

Once you are listed in Eurekster you can improve your site's 
ranking by searching on relevant keywords and clicking on your 
site. This will improve your sites ranking for anyone in your 
extended network of contacts - your contacts, their contacts and 
their contacts - so the more people that you have in your 
network the more people will be influenced by your search 
behaviour. 

Another way of driving traffic to your site using Eurekster is 
to create a popular SearchGroup. As moderator you can put a link 
to your site at the top of every search results page. You can 
also ensure your site is in the top results for any keywords 
that you chose. 

Eurekster has a new approach to search and is constantly adding 
new features, so be sure to keep an eye on it over the coming 
months. Play around with it and please send us any feedback. 

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Shaun Ryan is CEO of S.L.I. Systems Inc 
(http://www.sli-systems.com), specialists in site search. 
S.L.I.'s Learning Search service includes a hosted site search 
and comprehensive search reporting and analysis. S.L.I.'s 
customers include NBC.com, VERITAS software, Etronics.com and 
Trimble Navigation. Eurekster is owned by SLI Systems and the 
social networking company, RealContacts 
(http://www.realcontacts.com) Shaun holds a PhD in Artificial 
Intelligence from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. 
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