Ho hum, Wink?reference, customer adventures, search engines — by TDavid @ 4:30 pm PST
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A new tag mashup search engine has arrived (beta of course) called Wink and most the other blogger’s I’ve read are saying the same things: here it is, here’s what it does and leaving it there. Boring.
Will some enlighted winkers (?) please emerge and educate the rest of us why we should use this, how it can benefit us and offer specific, real world examples? Those are the magic questions I have for almost everything that is new: how and why should time be spent with/on this? Om is among the unconvinced.
Some background errata you don’t need if you’ve cruised your RSS aggregator or memeorandum already: Wink’s primary function is offering the ability to search across del.iciou.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb “and more” to find related links. I’m signed up for all of those sites so I decided to do some recent searches through tags in Wink to find the things I’d tagged and other recommendations for similar tags. All my tests returned good, relevant results.
I tried other searches and they performed very well too. Wink has a clean, polished user interface and design (unlike the totally uninspiring default wordpress design for the Wink official blog). Users can create their own collections of mashed up tags to share with others. Stowe Boyd points out one Wink feature he likes:
The “answers” feature — where people can add comments to the result of a search — is a new twist on the idea of “search as shared space” and if it catches on can create real value.
Basically this “neat” feature is a wiki that anybody can edit. Yawn. Pardon me.
While registering for the site (errors in Internet Explorer on the Wink FAQ page, BTW), I couldn’t help thinking: ho hum, this could be one of the few times I ever use this site.
Why?
If I’m already using MyWeb or Delicious or Digg (and I use at least one of these every workday) I’d use those services. It would be rare that I’d even want to search across all tag sites at once … but then maybe time will prove this wrong as I do more searches and spend more time with this. If I remember Wink is there to use.
For Wink’s sake, let’s hope users like me are the exception. I just can’t get too excited or attached about any mashup sites, I guess, because of how unstable they can be if the source sites cut them off. I have no idea if Wink is doing this the right way — that they sought permission from the sites they are scanning, using APIs, etc — or are building a fancy prototype that they hope to be acquired by a bigger fish for millions. If that’s the case then boy that story is becoming very cliched.
In fact, I only share stuff like this here because the polish on the site and hype elsewhere make me feel like I’m missing something that makes this service worthwhile. But … what could this be?
Tag collections? Zzzzzz. Tagging through Wink instead of the others? Not compelling, sorry. Syncing with Del.icio.us? Why? Why should I need or want to have syncing between two fundamentally competing systems online? Backup reasons? Why not backup to my own site? Why not export to my own operation as opposed to export/import another system? Jeff Clavier thinks, however, thinks this is neat.
Neat, neat, neat. Boy, that’s safe commentary.
What makes using Wink more compelling than using any of the other services directly? I’m just not seeing it, maybe readers will. After tagging this blog entry with “wink” at Wink, that’s where this ends and the sound of your wind chimes begin.
Related Posts- Google joins the tagging rage
- Not bitten by the tag bug yet, introducing Feedmarker and Feedtagger
- MyWeb 2.0 from Yahoo released
- Technorati adds related tags
- Create a Google coop custom search and connect to an Adsense account
- Podcast tagging
Do you prefer “cool” to “neat”
?
More seriously, 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.
Comment by Jeff Clavier — December 22, 2005 @ 5:13 pm PST
Jeff - hehe, cool isn’t much better if there aren’t many qualifiers about what makes it neat, cool, etc
Seriously, I noticed that they were using Google results to supplement queries that didn’t have much in the way of tag results. Will be interesting to see if the Google Web results go away once more tags are in the database. Heck, if they had been listening to the tags (via rss feed, APIs, etc) for the last 12 months they’d easily have a million or so tags to start with. They’d probably have to start with some list of sources so they didn’t end up with spam tag city.
Comment by TDavid — December 22, 2005 @ 5:29 pm PST
Hi TDavid. Michael Tanne here. I thought I’d chime in. You’ve raised a number of really good questions - many of which we’ve asked ourselves as we developed Wink. I’m glad to hear you were happy with the search results. That’s what matters most to us. Observers will weigh in on whether there will be enough tags, or whether people have time for another Web application, but what will really tell is how users like it.
You’ve described one simple use case - say you learn through your RSS aggregator that Guido van Rossum is joining Google. As you say, a quick check at memeorandum or Digg might provide sufficient background. A more curious person might search further. People are asking “What is Google’s motivation?” or “What’s Guido’s story?” A quick search at Wink for “Python Google” would yield results that show that Google has made extensive use of Python since the beginning according to Peter Norvig, and a search for “Guido van Russum” returns a nice recounting of Guido’s story at O’Reilly Radar. That’s because of all the pages on the Web, those are the ones users have selected through various sources.
That’s just the beginning of the story. More than a simple mashup of bookmark services - http://diggdot.us/ is a fun example of that - Wink is a search engine. We are integrating full text query techniques along with pretty detailed analysis of user input patterns to tease out the best results we can find. We know it’s a daunting challenge but approach it with resoluteness.
We expect that the aggregation of user input will provide a different kind of result than we’re all used to if handled well. You are correct that to start from scratch would be difficult - so we have been listening to tags for some time and actually process over 10 million tag instances and growing. But living what we preach, we allow users to mark favorites on Wink itself. The syncing with bookmarks is to allow users to use their favorite bookmarks service with Wink. We anticipate that a small percentage of people will actively identify favorite sites, so the model is designed to work that way. There are many examples of applications (cddb, eventful, wikipedia) where the enthusiastic 5% provides most of the information - and receive some benefit that satisfies them, even if it’s just the satisfaction of helping, or perhaps some recognition, and the 95% enjoy the results of their efforts - it’s the Cornucopia of the Commons (http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm) according to Dan Bricklin.
We are intentionally focusing on the early adopters because they are the ones who often make up that 5%, and who are participants in the user participatory Web. Sorry to be so cliche, but I really do see a trend here - and it’s not just “Web 2.0″
You are right to point out that it’s hard to change user behavior. A place in a user’s busy day is earned by delivering value. We’re trying to fit within a behavior pattern that is emerging, that of searching the bookmarks and other emerging information sources. Rather than setting out to draw people’s attention from something else, we will do everything we can to give them something useful. I know many people who did without Technorati for years but now can’t live without it. They previously didn’t think anyone was saying anything worthwhile in blogs. If users find what they’re looking for at Wink a few times, they’ll use Wink as one of their sources.
Look forward to seeing how you like Wink as it evolves. Thanks for giving us a chance. (love the spell checker on your site).
Comment by Michael Tanne — December 23, 2005 @ 4:06 am PST