Wink does it well

Wink recently released itself from private beta. It's a cross between web search and social bookmarking. I've been fiddling with it for some time, using some benchmark search phrases I've evolved over a long period of browsing and searching ("monica bellucci"), my personal verdict is - people do make a difference.

Not always, but quite a number of times, yes. Community-based searches, I feel, are particularly useful while making bizarre or recondite searches, typically searches where the search phrase could have a lot of different semantic interpretations. The difference in such cases is between the interpretation(s) people consider important v/s the interpretations a search engine considers important. For a search engine, "importance" is generally the number of inbound links. Hence, a web page with minimal such links yet great content (such as this blog) is bound to be a loser in conventional terms, unless a lot of webmasters wakeup to it and link it on their sites. That, even if it does happen, is a slow process. Now, in the new scenario, a normal web user can help in increasing a page's importance overnight from the engine's point of view, simply by tagging it. And voila! Content is the winner!