Legal Research

Wink Links to Half a Bil

People search engine Wink now has now indexed 500 million profiles from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.  I blogged this week about how I use Wink to look for people who don’t show up in White Pages searches (scroll down to the “Snip!” article.)

When I show Wink in classes, I often get attorneys who say, “Hey, I can’t find my Facebook profile.”  So knowing that they’ve updated their index, I performed a totally unscientific test.  (Science not being one of my strong points anyway.)  I searched for the 11 Jenkins librarians who admitted to having either a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile.  I got hits for 4 of them, a 36% success rate.  All them were for either Facebook or LinkedIn.  (I haven’t yet found someone’s MySpace profile.)

So Wink’s not a magic bullet.  But then again, there are no magic bullets in Web search.  You have to use multiple tools.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on September 25, 2008 (boomark / email).