OUseful Info

People-powered Search

Over the last few weeks, I have joined more social bookmarking services that I can keep of without the support of a social bookmarking tool!;-), so in part I rely on email reminders and new feature announcements to keep me going back to the services I don't use on a regular basis.

Today's reminder was from Wink, a "people powered" search engine. They describe themselves thus:

Wink is a search engine that integrates tag results from multiple sources such as del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb (and we're adding more). It gives you the freshest information on the web by serving up the most relevant tagged links for your search. We crawl and index tags from all over the web, and serve them up with web results, for a combination of freshness and accuracy. We also include other user-contributed content, such as answers from Wikipedia that you'll find under the Wink Answers tag, which is added by people like you. We also provide Google search, because tag coverage is still thin in some areas, and while tag results are really interesting, we know what you want sometimes is best found on Google.

You can also "tag" your results directly in Wink. A tag is similar to a bookmark, but it allows you also annotate any link with words that you associate with that link. For instance, if you tagged www.kodak.com, you could notate it with the terms "camera", "photography" and "film". Your tags are stored in your "My Page", so if you want to then go look at all the sites you use for photography, www.kodak.com and any others that you have tagged will be there.

The news item that caught my eye today was this:

"Sync your del.icio.us bookmarks to help you with your searches and make sure any favorites you mark at Wink are stored to your del.icio.us bookmarks."

So I gave it a go and sync'd my bookmarks from del.icio.us and into Wink easily enough, though I haven't tried the other way yet...

This relates very much to an earlier post on Social Bookmarking Interoperability, of course, although here it is one service (Wink) taking on the burden of importing and exporting info to/from another (del.icio.us, and presumably in the near future Yahoo!MyWeb2.0).

The Wink approach is not totally novel, of course - several other social bookmarking sevices allow you to do something similar. However, I wonder how many people, once they start using a particular social bookmarking service will make the effort to migrate to another? (The same is true in banking - people are loathe to change bank accounts from one provider to another..!) However, maintaining a sync'ed presence on several social bookmarking sites does mean that on those occasion when your main provider goes down (as del.icio.us did for me yesterday) you are still able to store bookmarks online.

One question that keeps coming to mind is how OUseful searching with peer, friend or cohort identified sites will be. Whilst not a walled garden, there may still be a tendency for groups to only see the sites they know about. This cuts both ways of course - by searching relevant sites you only get relevant info (hopefully!) BUT you may miss out on other, newer sites. Unless they get picked up by the sites you do accommodate and you add them to the fold.

The idea of users and groups building a lens to focus attention/search on user selected (i.e. high quality?!) sites related to a particular topic is not new of course (Squidoo's lenses couldn't be more explicitly named, the H20 Playlists perform a similar function, Rollyo's user defined meta-search engine allows you to search within a predefined list of sites on Yahoo! (hmmmm...;-) and Google is implying it's RSS reader is some sort of attention or content focussing device - http://www.google.com/reader/lens/).

Questions of course arise as to how best to manage to a course related lens, reminiscent of those raised in the context of social bookmarking in managed environments, though I think instructor control over a lens, e.g. where is it used to provide a way in to resources that are relevant to a particular topic and/or the delivery of particular,pre-specified learning outcomes (ergghhh..).

One thing I can see emerging within online courses is a "bounded search" element. If you look in any textbook, you will see standard features - academic content, exercise, lists of further reading etc. The structure is tried, tested and proven. In an online setting, it's not too hard to imagine constrained 'Further Search', where a tool such as Rollyo allows an instructor to identify a set of sites that a student can use to explore/search about a topic in a relatively focussed way.

This is one area where academic librarians may well be able to contribute to the ongoing support of elearning courses, although it is far more focussed in style than a resource such as ROUTES which just identifies high level, course relevant resources, rather than drilling down to sites that are particularly relevant to a particual topicof sub-topic within a course.

[Note to self and Lazyweb - build a search aggregator that performs a search over sites listed for a particular course in ROUTES, or over a particular set of sites listed in an RSS feed (such as a del.icio.us feed).]

Wink is still in closed Beta, although as they are trying to grow virally they are starting to roll out an 'Invite a Friend' service (mail me if you want an invite).

The Wink idea is close to that of Yahoo!'s MwWeb 2.0 (read more about it in this blog post, in this FAQ or in this post from Search Engine Watch), so it was interesting to note that a Wink sync to Yahoo!Myweb is also listed, though it's greyed out at the moment...

With Yahoo!'s purchase of del.icio.us, it will be interesting to see the extent to which people will become part of the search machine...!

Posted by ajh59 at December 20, 2005 10:31 AM