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).

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.

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.