Tanne tells me new features include:

Collections – Wink Collections are a cool way for you to gather and share the best links on any topic. A collection can be about anything – hilarious videos, your favorite band, the best restaurants in your area, or research on a new gadget – you name it. You create a collection and add links to it and it shows up in search results.

Others can add links to the Collection – a great way for people to share what they know and improve search.

Friends – Wink is a social search engine. It’s all about sharing great information with people. Connect with your friends, and people you meet on-line. Find someone who’s expert in a topic you’re passionate about or who’s created an awesome collection – add them as a friend. Check out who finds the best links – and connect with people who have similar interests.

Bookmarks – We all need to keep track of sites we find so we can go back to them or share them with a friend. You can use the “Add to Wink” button or the Wink Toolbar (coming soon) to bookmark any site you come across, or bookmark right from the search result by clicking on the star. You can add tags or comments to help you find the site later. It will also help others find the site. Also, if you use del.icio.us, you can sync your bookmarks in both directions. And if you use Flock, you can choose Wink as your bookmark service by installing the Wink Flock plug-in.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

They must be doing something right as SEW reports the senior product manager of Yahoo Shopping Search, David Beach, has decided to leave Yahoo after five years, and join Wink.

DiggThis | Furl

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

I’m not the only one who thinks we are in definite need of Search 2.0. Just ask the founders of Wink, Delicious, Eurekster, or Rollyo. Or Google and Yahoo! for that matter.

There generally seems to be two different approaches to Search 2.0. The first is the approach of Wink / Delicious, which is largely community driven.

Wink is people powered search. Users rank and tag Google search results, thus using collective wisdom to improve the results for queries. Delicious does something different but with the same goal of better search results – a search query for a word like blogs returns results for the most tagged item by the community.

On the other hand, we have Rollyo a concept based on individuals creating their own search engines. With Rollyo, for example, you can create a vertical search engine on a niche subject or one consisting solely of the sites you visit on a regular basis.

Eurekster is somewhat of a mix of these two ideas. Like Rollyo, Eurekster lets you create your own search engine, calling your creation a “swicki”. In this approach though, you train the swicki to help point it to more relevant sites or search queries. It then uses that information to weight search results – results do not include solely hits from the specified sites. Eurekster also learns from users and has a buzz cloud below its search box, showing the most popular queries by users. You can check out my swicki or see it in action on the right sidebar of Jeff Clavier’s site.

Yahoo! and Google jumped in on Search 2.0 by doing things like social bookmarking and search history. They seem to be betting on personalization over the community approach.

A pure technology solution is not going to solve the search problem. As I wrote in the past, there is no perfect search algorithm. The analysis above proves that. Now, it’s a matter of seeing which type of human intervention – at the individual or community level – brings us closer to Search 2.0.

Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

Blog posts, search results, news items; if it’s on the web, you can bet that someone has tagged it as something they’d like to go back to or share. Del.icio.us, Digg and Furl are just some of the many tools available to web users, looking to keep track of their favorite content. But with so many different tagging alternatives, and so many people tagging, how do you keep track of the most relevant content and where can you go to find a consolidated database of the best tagged “stuff”? That’s where Wink comes in to save the day!

Wink is a search engine that lets you find the results that others think are most relevant. It combines results from all the most popular tagging sites and then adds Google to fill any gaps. The result? Wink uses its TagRank(tm) algorithms to determine which pages are the most relevant while allowing uses to add their own rating.

We caught-up with Wink founder and CEO, Michael Tanne, and asked him to explain the concept behind Wink and his vision of how “tagging” will impact search results to come.

[Andy Beal] What are Wink’s goals for 2006?

[Michael Tanne] First, we’re working on getting the word out about Wink – it’s a different kind of search engine and it’s not exactly mainstream yet, but for early adopters and social media enthusiasts it has been delivering good results. Second, we will continue to increase the number of sources that we have to include more social bookmarking sites, and other relevant sources that incorporate tags. We’re also going to be working with other groups to advance some of the standards we’re working on for exchanging tags, such as tagomatic.org and tagcommons.org. Finally, we’re going to continue to work on improving the quality of our search results by improving our algorithms and index.

[AB] At what point will Wink be able to solely use its tag search results?

[MT] Wink doesn’t intend to ever rely on Wink tag results alone. Our defined purpose is to provide users with a search across as much of the user intent on the Web as possible. That means indexing bookmarks and tags, ratings and reviews, and other user-generated content from across a large number of sources. Some amount of user intent will be expressed on Wink itself, because it’s logical to do that in the context of search, but people also do these things at other places where the context is right for that, such as on a shopping site, using a social bookmarks tool, on a social news site, etc. And we think that is just as important and valid as tagging they do at Wink.com.

[AB] What do you foresee as the “tipping point” for Wink?

[MT] As far as a tipping point, that probably happens when there are enough users doing enough tagging around the Web and on Wink, that users who do a search on Wink see a measurably better search result – it’s a critical mass of tags, so to speak. At that point there is more of an incentive to use Wink, and that use leads to more user input, which leads to a better experience, and so on.

[AB] What are your thoughts on the future of vertical search? What role will vertical search engines (like Wink) play in the overall search engine landscape in 2010?

[MT] At this point, and for the next several years, vertical search engines will do better within the context of their particular domain than the large search engines. The large search engines have done a great job in large areas such as local and news, and at including quick answers in context – flight numbers, area codes, etc. But when it comes to searching for travel or jobs or events, those are specialized areas where the user is searching for certain fields (or facets) such as location, company, airline, special meals, window or aisle, degree required, etc. Big search engines have trained people to enter a few words into a search box and get 10 results back. They may introduce vertical search but it will be an area where they don’t innovate as fast as those focused on a terrific experience in that specialty. Perhaps some of those will get acquired. Over time, though, I suspect the major search engines will expand and gradually encompass vertical search.

Wink – and companies like Technorati and Feedster for blog search – aren’t so much vertical search, as they are searching a type of information rather than a particular vertical subject area.
Technorati searches blogs – about any subject. Wink searches tags – about any subject. There is room for these approaches for the foreseeable future.

[AB] What measures does Wink have in place to protect its search results against spam/malicious tagging?

[MT] In the world of anti-spam for email, there’s a company Cloudmark [disclosure: Tanne is an investor] which operates a network in which users block spam when they see it and then models take over from there, blocking the spam for millions of users. There’s great power in having an army of users who know spam when they see it. They can be more effective at blocking spam than algorithms alone, as long as is it very easy for them to block things they consider spam, and a model to apply that blocking across the service.

[AB] How does Wink determine relevancy? Can you elaborate on the relationship between the standard search algorithms you are using and your TagRank(tm) algorithms?

[MT] Ahhh, you’re asking for the recipe to the secret sauce? I can just say a little about this. We think that user intent can be inferred from user input such as tagging (but that’s just one kind of input) and the amount a Web page is tagged suggests its relevance. That’s helpful but not enough by itself. You have to take into account who tagged the page and in what context. Also relevance tends to change over time. We have thought through and implemented (and patented) a robust set of algorithms around this, and are tuning and refining every day.

[AB] Which of the big search engines do you see align most with your goals for Wink? Which do you think would find the most value in Wink’s offering?

[MT] So far, Google has been the most aligned and we have a good partnership wherein they provide core Web search for us and we serve ads using AdSense (which of course they share in the revenue). That isn’t to say Yahoo or MSN wouldn’t be good partners but we have found Google to be very helpful so far. We see that Yahoo has taken quite an interest in social bookmarking (by acquiring del.icio.us) and social search (with MyWeb and Yahoo360). It’s evident they get this area and are invested in it, but I don’t know if that means they’d be a better partner or more of a competitor. These things have a way of evolving over time

[AB] Thanks for taking the time to tell us more about Wink!

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Technorati’s Niall Kennedy posted his exclusive follow-up to his assessment of Google Reader’s backend. API access to Google Reader could be publicly available as quickly as January.

Kennedy cited Google’s Jason Shellen and engineer Chris Wetherell in confirming the report. Shellen joined Google after it purchased his employer, Blogger developer Pyra Labs. Shellen now serves as product manager for Google Reader.

In the post, Kennedy wrote the API would include “synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling.”

Currently, RSS usage has been pegged at about 6 percent of Internet users, according to Pew Internet and American Life project. Products like the Google Reader and several other feed reading and aggregating services face a significant challenge in 2006, as Microsoft brings RSS support to Outlook 12, Internet Explorer 7, and the Vista operating system.

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Add to | Yahoo My Web | Shadows | Wink

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Yahoo noted in a statement how charitable giving increases toward the end of a year. The company cited the Kintera/Luth Nonprofit Trend Report, which claimed 65 percent of donors are influenced in their giving by what they find on the Internet.

Now, Yahoo has kicked off some extra effort to get donors to give generously before the end of 2005. They have teamed with Network For Good to do so, and spotlighted several charities while providing the means to discover more, and find out more about them.

Various Yahoo properties like Messenger and News, and keyword integration in Search, will promote Cyber Giving Week. The initiative formally kicks off on December 25th, and runs through the 31st.

Users will be able to search for local charities with the online tool. Resources on the microsite let people research causes and the charities that support them. Also, a “Guide to Giving” offers charity profiles, and provides a link to the Wall Street Journal’s guide on which charities accomplish the most.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Visitors to Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig’s website will see a link to the organization’s fundraising program. According to Lessig, Creative Commons needs to do some public fundraising, otherwise their tax-exempt status could be in jeopardy.

In comments to the story, Lessig noted the problem was tax-exemption related, writing “The live or die is that foundations are blocked from donating when there’s a tax exempt problem.” Currently the organization needs to raise about another $100,000 by year’s end.

Creative Commons provides licenses that content creators can use to make certain uses of their work available under terms that are less restrictive than a full copyright. They call it “Some Rights Reserved.” Content creators can use the service for free.

Licenses cover attribution, noncommercial use, derivative works, and sharing. Many of the licenses can be combined; a song can be licensed under Creative Commons as requiring attribution, restricting commercial use without permission, and permitting the creation of a derivative work (like a mashup) from the song as long as the mashup is distributed with the same license as the original song.

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Add to | Yahoo My Web | Shadows | Wink

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

But first, the prologue (n.) An introductory act, event, or period

Slashdot gave the tech world one of the first websites featuring user-submitted content. Digg arrived later, dispensed with the formal editorial process, and put the submittal and approval/disapproval power in the hands of users.

People who like both sites either visit both, grab their RSS feeds, or stop by SlashDigg to view both front pages side by side. Then del.icio.us/popular joined the mix, with content from all three sites blended at Diggdot.us and ended up in feed readers everywhere.

Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 (beta, natch) has been around for a few months, but more as an enclosed part of the Yahoo network, until now.

Now we get to Wink. If you’ve finally come around to accepting ‘blogosphere’ as a word, Wink wants you to try on ‘tagosphere’ too. It’s aimed at users of the four sites mentioned previously, and instead of sifting for indexed content, it looks for content that’s been tagged at Digg, del.icio.us, and Yahoo, as well as within Wink.

Google results appear when queries for tags don’t return a lot of entries on the result page. Also, Wink Answers draws from Wikipedia, and users can see the index and content entries for a tag that appears in the online encyclopedia.

Wink Answers relies on concepts to help users find disambiguated information, according to its FAQ. Terms with multiple potential meanings (the FAQ uses Star Wars as an example: movie or government defense project) each have different concepts.

Wink has the prerequisite features one expects from a Web 2.0 company: rounded corners, AJAX programming, bookmarklets, Firefox plugins, and pastel colors. They also make a feature called Collections available.

Similar to Shadows groups, Collections let users assemble related links and tags into a collection. Users can publish their Collections so other people can view it and add it to their watch lists that let them know when the collection is updated.

Wink offers site publishers with quality, authoritative content an opportunity to tag their pages and expose them to a tech-savvy, early adopter audience. The site has built a blocking mechanism to report and oust spam or bad sites from search results, according to the FAQ, but in testing with Firefox 1.5 and Opera 8.51 the symbol for blocking didn’t appear in pages I saw.

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Add to | Yahoo My Web | Shadows | Wink

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Wink lets you…

Or, if you are a del.icio.us user, you can sync your del.icio.us bookmarks into Wink, which will also help guide your searches. Likewise, you can choose to make sure any favorites you mark at Wink are stored to your del.icio.us bookmarks.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.