Search plus wiki =swiki. A Swiki cloud is one of the search options on The Pisstakers and the feature has been evolving quietly but very positively. Looking around the Swiki site, the developers really did live up to their tag at the bottom of every page - working hard and asking for ways to make Swiki better. Yo swicki, wazzup?

Advances in Swiki

In the early days, the name, Swiki, was the best thing about the search service that you could tailor to keywords on your site. But we now see it includes voting for search results; commenting to create a wiki for each keyword; easy set up to include Adsense. It is great.

Why Swiki is great for users

You need to find an article somewhere on the blog or site you are on. Either click on a keyword in the Swiki cloud, or input a keyword in the search box - press enter. A page of search results appears, (hopefully including a link or two to posts on the site you are already on.)

The wiki as in wikipedia on-line encyclopedia, allows you to also comment on keywords on your site, adding valuable information for future users.

Visually, from the top down, it is way more stylish than Google's minimalist layout, and very easy to read. Apart from the Google style links, there are "usefulness" voting options to the left of each search result. Also it is loaded with other info - a header with a set of related images, a side bar of neatly placed Adsense or specific adverts from other providers. Practical and aesthetically pleasing.

A couple of negatives for Swiki users

Just wish the server was a bit quicker to produce the pretty display before you glaze over from boredom while it loads. Also, it is hit and miss with the validity of the search results. The Pisstakers is pretty well indexed with Google, but Swiki is less forgiving and we often don't appear even where our keywords are big and bold in the tag cloud.

Why Swiki is great for webmasters

Set up of a swiki tag cloud is dead easy using keywords from your site. As it develops, Swiki will let you know of new search terms visitors have tried so you can add them to the cloud.

Looks are an important part of this Swiki deal and you can size and colorize the tag cloud to suit your theme, either from default options or with all the homegrown CSS in the world. They give you the code to post wherever you like. No brains required.

Money Of interest to mercenary bloggers is the valuation option. At this point in time our Swiki generates enough searches to value the Pisstakers account at $1000. Good value for a buyer with more money than sense.

In summary

No doubt, the ability to organise information and make it searchable and findable is the future challenge for online publishers. Swiki is one way that this can be achieved easily and in style. Check out Swiki and get in on the ground.