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.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on September 25, 2008 - 3:57 pm

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