Wink: People-Powered Search
Posted by: Rob Hof on December 22
The new “people-powered search engine,” Wink, has just launched its public beta. In CEO Michael Tanne’s own words:
Wink is a different kind of search engine - one that searches favorite links from del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, Yahoo My Web and others to find pages that people have found to be interesting and useful. As more services incorporate tags and user input, new pages are added to the Wink index and ranked using our TagRank technology to deliver the best results. The more that people add favorites and tags, the better it will get.
So when you do a search on Wink, you get one list of those people-powered links, and then another list that’s straight Google results. It looks pretty useful, especially for folks who have trouble keeping up with the crush of tagging sites. Mike Arrington has more on the site. Om Malik echoes my uncertainty about whether most (or even enough) people will take the time to tag sites and search results. (He also adds an interesting aside: If such sites reduce the number of pages people have to search to find something, does the lower number of page views ultimately knock a hole in Google’s revenues?)
The one question I have is how much extra time people will take to figure out how a new search site works to best advantage beyond just typing in a word. A9 has a great method of narrowing your results to specific sites or types of sites, and it works well but, well, takes work. Wink helps make some of that narrowing a little easier, though whether it’s easier enough remains to be seen.
