Social search company Wink just went live with their relaunched site, making better use of collaboratively built collections, offering a Firefox toolbar and other changes we detailed in an early preview. Wink is a smart, well funded company with a useful service in a space that’s got a lot of potential. This relaunch isn’t terribly exciting but it does make one of the major players in social search significantly more usable than they had been. This one’s a company to watch for the long haul.
by
Marshall Kirkpatrick
on
September 6, 2006
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- Actively Discussed Posts
- NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how 'citizen journalists' can't handle the truth
278 comments - "Horrible Things" Slink Back Into Zynga
216 comments - Think The Droid Launch Was A Let Down? Not So Fast.
146 comments - My Not-So-Epic Quest To Find The Elusive Verizon Droid Line
120 comments - App Store Hypocrisy Update: Mein Kampf Complete With Nazi Logo Approved
108 comments
They don’t seem to be drawing attention to a relaunch anywhere on their site or blog.
That site does not click with me at all.
there is an inherent problem with a social search engine that doesn’t have access to the scoring algorithms that produce the results. Wink is fed by Google, and so they have no idea how relevant the 1st result is compared to the 2nd or 3rd, etc.
For example, I do a search for “searchles” on Wink http://wink.com/searchles and I don’t see http://www.searchles.com anywhere. In fact, I can only get to 21 results total even though it says there are 61,800. Maybe this is a bad example and there is something else going on here. (maybe someone reported abuse?)
The point is, there is only so much you can do tracking votes on someone else’s search. In order to be truly effective, you need to have access to the scoring and original results for each search.
Why can I STILL not import Firefox bookmarks to get started!? I remember now why I never came back to wink.com after I signed up 2 months ago.
Does wink have to pay google to be able to user their search results? I know you can use the google API with limits … I just wonder what google’s motivation is for allowing Wink to use their search results.
It looks like they still have a few winks to work. I’m getting a lot of db errors http://wink.com...lections-create
Thats weird when I clicked on the link in my comments it worked, but on the home page when I click on a collection I’m getting errors.
http://wink.com...lections-create
http://wink.com...lections-create
I like wink and new improvements sound exciting..I think social search is really different genre ..who cares if I don’t get the most accurate results for some queries, I use these sites when I am looking for interesting things “related” to a topic and not necessarily something most relevant (focused narrowly on the topic)..
Social collections are a great idea in theory. The execution here needs quite bit of work. I found the collections to be of limited use. Cleaver searching on Google produces more relevant results. Lots of link spam here. Wink needs a quality / relevance engine to filter results.
jonny
Looks like a porn site to me…. Too many nude pics on the front page