Wink - A social search engine

Today, I have discovered Wink, a search engine that likes to call itself social. I’m usually a little skeptic regarding these search engines, but this was impressive. Basically, I liked the idea.

Picture this. Within a search, you get tons of irrelevant links and you will literally browse your butt off to find the most relevant ones. How about if you’d be able to rate the posts somewhere, so other people that will search for the same thing will receive the relevant results at the top of the list?

That’s what a search engine does, basically. But this search engine seems special. It allows registered users to “wink” a certain search result if they consider it relevant. Imagine 10 people do the same as you do. That means that winked article was useful for 10 other people. That also means there’s a high chance to be relevant for you as well. That’s why Wink puts it on top of the list.

They are based on the same principle as Wikipedia. That means they mostly rely on users to create, modify and rate their content.

Wink is a social search engine. We surface the search results that other people have found to be the best stuff for your questions. We have lots of simple ways to let you say what you think about the quality of results - from being able to re-rank search results, to bookmarking sites you want to remember and blocking results that aren’t good. Wink’s PeopleRank ™ technology takes all this information and refines it to deliver the results that people think are the best.

Wink also lets you create what we call “Collections”. Collections are simply a way for you to share your knowledge of a subject with other people by putting the best links for a topic all together in one place. You can subscribe to other people’s collections, you can make them public and let other people add to your collections, or you can make them private so that only you can see them. Public collections will show up in the Wink search results, so that people can find the very best set of results for any search topic.

As you start to use Wink, it’s likely you’ll start seeing other users who have the same opinions on results as you do. You can add them to your friends list (sort of Flickr-style) and you can also subscribe to any collections that they have made.

What do you think about it? Is this a good and/or permanent option to get rid of irrelevant results?

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Posted in Internet by Bogdan Boghiu