Michael Tanne on Wink. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox

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December 22, 2005

Michael Tanne on Wink

Posted by Stowe Boyd

Wink launched its beta today, entering the increasingly crowded and noisy metasearch/social search arena:

[from Wink Blog by Michael Tanne]
Some people might say “What exactly does Wink search?” Our thinking is that people who are frequent users of del.icio.us, digg and slashdot, who get their information from many sources, and who count on knowing what people are finding interesting right now - those people would like one place to search all those sources. Google and Yahoo are great for the whole Web, and we’ve integrated Google search into our service, but the Wink results - those are a measure of what people are thinking right now, based on their bookmarks and tagging.

I talked with Michael several times recently: at Web 2.0, TagCamp in Palo Alto, and in his office for an interview in the upcoming New Visionaries series (coming in January)! I am one of the people that the new Wink service is targeted toward, since I stay glued to my laptop almost all day, tracking what is happening out there. The beta is open, so it will be interesting to see what happens when a large number of people stream onto the site, and begin to socialize the search results based on their individual notions of what is worthwhile.

The "answers" feature -- where people can add comments to the result of a search -- is a new twist on the idea of "search as shared space" and if it catches on can create real value. The two-way synchronization with Del.icio.us tags and Wink tags will certainly help lower the barrier to adoption.

Looks cool!

[pointer from Steve Rubel and Michael Arrington]

tags: michael+tenne, social+search, wink, search+as+shared+space, del.icio.us

Comments (40) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: Technology

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1. Michael on December 22, 2005 10:35 AM writes...

Wink is pretty nifty when searching for current pages, but I feel that the algorithm doesn't necesarily find pages that have meaning when it comes to a specific topic however. Try a search on the word "taxi" and you will see that although the pages are bookmarked by plenty, and may all be tagged with the word they are not completely relevant. Wink needs to focus on that. I founded Seekum.com to try and help with this problem. Seekum allows its users to change the results themseleves so that they will become more relevant over time without the hassle of bookmarking millions of pages.

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December 22, 2005

Michael Tanne on Wink

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