Adaptive equalization is important due to its need for reducing inter-symbol interference in digital communication. In this work, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is adopted for designing adaptive equalizers. The effectiveness of the PSO algorithms in channel equalization is investigated. Different modifications of the original PSO technique are discussed and a new modification is proposed. The performance of various PSO algorithms is compared to that of the conventional LMS algorithm. Extensive simulation work has shown the superior performance of the proposed PSO-based adaptive equalizer over its LMS-based counterpart.