Wink Social Search, now with people search

Wink calls itself a social search engine. It is that and more. Wink is also a community where you register to get access to bookmarking and tagging search results and adding them to thematic collections. Last week Wink added people search. They crawl Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn, allowing you to search for name, username, location, interests and more.

What is Wink Social Search?
Wink’s web search option searches Google and rank the search results according to their own People Rank algorithm. Registered Wink members can re-rank search results, bookmark and tag sites they like and block results they don’t like. Wink’s PeopleRank uses this information along with tags from Digg, del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb and other similar services to refine the ranking according to the input from the users.

Wink also lets you create collections, grouping the best links for a topic all 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. When testing Wink, we made a collection of sites that we consider to be among the most important sources of search engine news.

If you come across other users who have the same opinions on results as you do, you can add them to your friends list and/or subscribe to any collections they have made.

So in addition to the PeopleRank, which may or may not be an improvement on Google’s ranking, you can benefit from seeing the collections, tags and recommendations of other Wink members.

Wink relies on lots of user interaction to make the site a useful tool and really improve the search results. It seems that in it’s first year in business, they have not quite reached critical mass. But Wink could still attract a lot of users.

Wink People Search
The new people search feature may attract a large number of potential users from Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn.

It appears under the People tab on the homepage. Wink crawls Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn, so when you use Wink’s people search, you search an index of more than 100 million profiles from these three social networking sites.

You can search for name, username, location, interests and more, and you can narrow your search by network, gender, age and whether they’re single or taken. You can even search specific areas of a profile page. The advanced search options can be found behind the link “More ways to search” to the right of the search button under the People tab.

In the search results, a little icon identifies in which network Wink found a person. Depending on which information a person has in her profile, Wink includes name, photo, location, interests and more

If you find someone who shares your interests or come across an old friend, you can “Wink” them to add them to your your wink page for later.

The new people search feature can prove to be useful for people who spend a lot of time on networks like MySpace. But for this tool to mature, Wink needs to add more networks and to become more visible to the people who use them.