Wink 2.0 to launch next week
Marshall Kirkpatrick
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Social search engine Wink will launch version 2.0 of its service early next week with changes designed to make make search more social than ever. I’ve described below the information I was able to get out of them prelaunch, but I hope there’s more to come. Social search has a lot of potential and I do like Wink’s approach.
Here’s the basics on Wink. It’s a search engine that indexes tagged content from Digg, Yahoo MyWeb, Furl, Slashdot, other social bookmarking services and it’s own users’ archives. Those items are displayed as appropriate on search results pages above results from Google. It’s Google, augmented by peoples’ tags. It’s also a standard social bookmarking service in and of itself.
Users can also create collections, or lists of items related to a given topic, a list of pages related to buying a video projector or a list of pages related to the band Weezer. Lists can be subscribed to by other users. Unlike standard tags in typical social bookmarking services, any given list can be added to by another user.
All of that could read like standard rhetoric, but it can be interesting to use the FireFox search plug-in and add tag search to the top of your Google results. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward social bookmarking service this could work for you. Wink also synchs with del.icio.us and lets users change wiki entries inside Wink that were gleaned from Wikipedia.
The company received $6.2 million in funding from Cambrian Ventures, Greylock Partners and angels last year. You can see our previous coverage of Wink here.
What’s new in Wink 2.0? Users will be able to move search results up and down by vote, including results from Google. The current version of Wink just ranks sites by the number of Wink users who have tagged them. Quick voting could help increase the quality of the results or it could substitute carefully thought out algorithms with the whims of fickle users. It’s a delicate balance, but Wink says for example that spam control will be implemented shortly to prevent antisocial users from gaming the system. The single item that’s received the most thumbs up on that query will be displayed at the top of the page.
Collections built by users will play a much more prominent roll in search results as well. While the current version only displays collections with titles that match search terms, the new version will index the full text of the pages included in the collection, tags and user ratings in order to display the most high quality collections by relevance. Users will also be able to subscribe to future additions made to collections.
Toolbar lovers rejoice - there will be a FireFox toolbar available for Wink next week as well, so you can perform all the site’s functions from any page.
Finally, the garish colors that make the current site so hard on the eyes will be gone in favor of a more appealing user interface. Unfortunately the new logo is annoying, I think.
That’s the information I could get out of the company prior to launch of the new site. There should be more, as the above looks to me like little beyond news that the site is living up to its stated goals better than before. Even that is good news though, as Wink search is something I’ve wanted to use for some time but have found unsatisfying in action to date.
Wink 2.0 will go up early next week, but you can visit the site and provide your email if you’d like to be notified when it’s available.
Very eager to see if these new features (enhancements?) will help carry wink over the hump needed for a more liquid community search experience.
Looking at alexa’s latest, it seems that they’ve been treading water since launch:
http://clipclip.org/john/clips/detail/8043
Michael Tanne and team are some of the best in the biz.. fingers crossed for them and the whole social search force overall…
j
This does sound good. But its really a wait and watch game whether users would actually spend time voting search results to display only the most relevant on top. Most users just want search results and nothing else. I am sure wink can develop some algorithm which records how many clicks are generated on a particular item and use this knowledge according with user voting to serve relevant results.
I have to agree with you, Wink hasn’t lived up to expectations.
Seems like people will just use Google instead.
I’m afraid Wink will not “wink and eye”, since most people use search engines to find information as fast as possible and move on. That is what has made Google the “daddy” of all search engines–speed and relevancy.
I hope Winks works, but have my strong doubts. Sorry Winks!
Great a search egnine just for the 53,561…
Interesting…
Sounds like an interesting search hybrid - mixing the best of both worlds: user-created social bookmarking sites and algorithmic search engines.
Very similar to squuido but with a much better name..
We’ve been hard at work and Wink beta 2 is now live. Search is important, and the big algorithmic search engines do a good job for many searches. But we think that the accumulated insights of people coupled with machine algorithms can sift out better results than the machine algorithms alone. There is something unique about a person finding a great, but obscure site and elevating it in the result because it satisfies their search, or discovering a link that is intriguing and funny. We agree there are requirements: enough user input to fill in enough results, reasonable spam detection and sufficient algorithms to refine the search.
User input: For some it’s fun and rewarding to know they are helping to create a democratic search engine - adding links or giving thumbs up to good sites, giving thumbs down or even blocking sites they don’t like and seeing the search engine respond. Wink also works well if you keep a copy of your bookmarks handy. We invite users of delicious to sync your bookmarks with Wink for the best experience. Of course most people like to search quickly and get on their way. We want Wink to work for those people as well. That’s one reason we’ve teamed with Google and keep the path clear for simple searching.
Spam detection: Social search is faced with spam as all search engines are. The difference is how it’s fought. Regular search engines fight spam by constantly tuning the algorithms - resulting in an “arms race” with the spammers, and in the process affecting legitimate sites as well. Social search empowers people to stop spam. Anytime you see spam at Wink, just click the block button and watch it disappear. This helps train the Wink engine against future spam as well.
One other thing - Wink Collections. What if instead of each search result containing 10 unrelated links that scored high in a search engine, you could find Collections - links about a topic, organized based on real people’s successful searching. You can build new collections - and others can add more links. We’ve already seen hundreds of collections built in the first few days. (We are refining the collection UI it in response to your input). For example, you can see collections when you search Wink for extreme programming (http://wink.com/Extreme%20Programming) or hybrid cars (http://wink.com/hybrid%20cars) or browse collections: (http://wink.com/–collections)
Thanks for you patience and participation - together we’re tackling something difficult… but worth it. Let’s keep innovation and competition - and even democracy - alive in search. Let’s push things forward.
Cheers,
Michael Tanne
Wink Founder
This great resource http://portaldiscount.com/fair.....ctice-act/