Wink, the search engine that lets you search user profiles across many social networks, has announced that it has indexed a whopping 500 million profiles worldwide - double the number it had twelve months ago. Wink also predicts similar growth in the future, with a projected 1 billion profiles indexed over the next year.
Wink originally launched back in 2005 as a user-enhanced search engine that asked the crowd to help tag and rank search results. The site transitioned to a search engine for people in fall 2006 and went on to partially liquidate, explaining that the company’s new direction was not what investors had originally signed up for.
The site now allows users to search for someone’s online presence across a variety of social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Friendster, and a number of others. Information available for each profile depends on the privacy settings on each network, but generally includes at least links to their profiles along with a photo to make sure you’ve found the right person.
The milestone is significant, assuming the majority of the profiles represent legitimate people and aren’t simply names with no associated information. But while the growing repository of profile data may prove useful, the site has adopted some irritating advertising and affiliate schemes - for example, results often include links to profiles on PeopleFinders, which are only visible after becoming a paying member of the site.
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I was sold until the last sentence. That is an irritating advertising strategy that smacks of spam. Most users are now too sophisticated to be dupped into paying for information they were lured into, thinking it was free.
Count me unimpressed. Those search results are a mess.
Apparently people like it:
http://www.quantcast.com/wink.com
Tech question: what is the sort criteria? If I search for “Tom”, what’s used to determine the order of those 1M Toms that seems to exist there?
Yay it found my name! But so did Google Search.
500 million profiles and im still not found.
HumanLocator.com
lol 500m profiles its a lot of people.
Try finding your name in the spammers list somewhere out there.
are you shitting me? there aren’t even 500 million unique online network identities - this is an optics game, complete crap, my estimate is a store of 50 to 100 million actual profiles and zillions of variations to come (dupes, fakes, et al)
total. crap. completely.
I have similar impression. It shouldn’t be too hard to prove whether it is crap. Randomly pickup 100 profiles, and investigate how many of them are legitimate.
Cool, now they have 500 million mostly useless pages to spam Google, as they have done since their start. Great news this.
well said
Try http://www.nicado.net, much better and ad free.
Total scam. They just re-index linkedIn, zoomInfo, and a few other people-oriented sites. Plus they pull in some credit report information, and they frame google results.
Where is the innovation and the wide moat?
dayum!
They steal people’s pics and put them on their website. Just like how Google got their beginning from. I guessed copyright law is no longer applicable.
Copyright infringement, begin it should.
wait, wtf? for every name i type in (i tried myself, david hornik, jason kincaid, michael arrington) it just spits back a google search query filtered for domain like facebook/linkedin/twitter - is that really it? wtf?
Don’t want to have to pay for something that I am sure someone will make for free soon.
For what it’s worth, Wink has its own distributed profile crawler and search index (lucene and in house based technology) and maybe occasionally back filled with Google results for certain queries. It has real technology, albeit a questionable product.
Keep checking who owns it now
i liked this search engine..this is very good i think
no, i would have to say their technology sucks as well.
Yeah, I’d say “profiles” isn’t so much accurate as “names.” I’m all for aggregators (one of our clients is in the people search space), but I also feel that the recent focus on pushing people to affiliate links is a turnoff. Granted, they’re probably under pressure to prove a revenue model, and you can’t always say “oh we’ll run ads” & get away with it…
Try a differnt approach to people search - Copenda,
http://www.copenda.com
Absolutely crappy - only returns google search results !!
You guys should check for the legitimacy of sites before posting in TC.
Where is the value for the user here? What ensures Wink’s sustainability? Far from impressed.
Why can’t one of these aggregators work in info from real people finders like, lexis and westlaw? I’m sure a deal could be worked where they give the online presence to lexis and lexis gives some real world data to them. Or they could aggregate other legitimate free data like court records, business records, etc.
Being able to connect web presence and real world presence would be neat.
Nice
“partially liquidated” was obviously not complete enough. I can crawl the public profiles of Facebook and linkedIn too.
They have my public facebook picture of me and nothing else. Nice job guys. Most of their competitor-types have at least tied my public LinkedIn profile to my Facebook and my blog and at least a handful of other places my bio is posted.
They could probably get 6 figures for that URL though. So they got that going for them.