Eurekster gets funding

Congratulations to Eurekster. On Tuesday, the company is set to announce that it closed its Series B round of financing. Eurekster raised $5.5 million in its first institutional round of funding from Technology Venture Partners of Australia, Transcosmos Investments of Japan, and its private investors who were part of the company's A round. By the sounds of its investors, it's obvious that the San Francisco-based company is going global. And, that is exactly Eurekster's intention now that it has new funds. Eurekster is one of the early providers of social search, which is basically search based on audience behavior. Essentially, Eurekster's technology allows publishers to provide better search results to their audience by analyzing click-stream analysis of the audience. The idea is that the audience provides another layer of vetting and ranking of results that algorithms cannot do. I interviewed Steven in the past, and from our past conversations and his demo, I have to say the service could be quite useful for niche publishers who want search rankings to be based on what their audience or experts within that audience find to be most relevant for particular keywords. The theory is that the audience of a particular niche site should be far more astute about choosing which pages are the most relevant for a given search than other ranking systems, such as freshness. Here's a hypothetical: If someone types in "Q1 Google's earnings" into a Swicki (Eurekster's search widget) on a financial news site, the first result would not necessarily be based on date and time, but the article that the most number of people read. Theoretically, the fact that more people read one particular report over another would suggest that one is more relevant than the other. It's a good service. I've had a Swicki (Eurekster's search widget) on my personal blog for more than a year.