In an on-again off-again tale of woe, Eurekster‘s site is back up again.
Last week it was reported that the site was down. It is now back up with a blog post saying that all the “problems” of the past few days are over. In January a related company gave notice of their intention to cease business in New Zealand and the Eurekster website is still showing the management team as including both a VP Product and VP Engineering who, according to their LinkedIn profiles, are both previous employees of the business.
Regardless of its current status, the prognosis doesn’t look good for a company that has a business model that is marginal at best. RWW put it well when they aid that;
The company’s method of determining relevance in search was always a little unclear. Google Site Search is easy to install and its results are fairly predictable. Many users wanted search results in chronological order, but that’s not the first place Swicki searches took you. Finally, the Swicki usually lived in a blog sidebar. That’s a hard place to build a business.
Co-founder Steven Marden is still there but New Zealand based co-founder Grant Ryan has moved on, I’ve also heard from a good source that a number of New Zealand based engineering staff have moved to sister company SLI systems.
