Search + Tags + People = Wink

Michael Tanne, the CEO of Wink, briefed me a couple of days ago on the forthcoming public beta that became available tonight around midnight Pacific Time. Wink is a search engine that allows users to bookmark and tag search results sourced from other popular bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, etc. Wink has an implementation of the concept of leveraging user's gesture of attention - in their case tagging - to  thereby altering the order in which results are going to be displayed, and somehow rank results internally, an approach already implemented by services like Digg or Tailrank. Wink also displays Google results  below its own, which  provides an easy mean to compare  Google and Wink on certain queries.

There are a couple of neat features that just got released in this version:

• It is possible to seed one's tag history by importing the content of a del.icio.us or MyWeb archive, which is a great idea. Even better, wink's and del.icio.us' caches can be kept in sync. This is a great idea.
  Update: TDavid has a gentle go at me on the "neatness" of the functionality I have listed, so I am expanding on this one (from a comment I left on his post):

  The reason why the del.icio.us import is compelling is that I find this whole idea of using my tags to drive the relevance of my search results interesting. But I don't want to be forced to use a wink tagging system to do that - and that's why I don't use MyWeb even if MyYahoo is my home page. I want to use the tagging system/framework(s) I like, and then have Wink do the work to integrate them.
  Furthermore,there aren't that many tags out there and it would take a long time for Wink to get enough tagged information to do something useful/meaningful on the relevance front.
  Finally on the synchronization of tag caches, why not ? If for some reason I find a search result through Wink that I want to tag, knowing that my tags will also end up in del.icio.us is a matter of convenience. Hence the neat.

• Wink now offers an Answer feature, in the form of a wiki page that can be edited by the user community. It actually uses Wikipedia content as initial content when a definition is available for a given query. For example this ego search picked up my Wikipedia entry, whereas I manually entered this one.

More about Wink's functionality can be found on the Wink blog announcing Obi-wan OB1, and of course, TechCrunch was the first to cover the news.

Wink's business model will most likely be based on some form of advertising, and the usual AdWords are already on the site. What will be interesting to monitor once a critical mass of tags have been amassed is whether Wink has a better yield than “plain Google” thanks to the increased relevance brought by tagging.

Actually, Michael will be one of the participants of the January Search SIG that will cover “Alternate search: tagging, bookmarking, social sharing”.

Tags: wink

Comments

[Michael]

It's difficult to understand exactly how Wink is ranking pages. I think that it is a mixture of both tag density, and how many people have bookmarked the page. As founder of Seekum.com I am of course very interested in this subject. At seekum we give absolute control of ranking to our users.

[Xen Dolev]

I see it as a human experiment, since the main issue here is the reliance on the human factor...