Wink.com Review: Searching 200 Million Profiles for Free!

If you haven't played around with Wink yet, you're missing out on a big tool in the Web 2.0 toolbox. Wink is a search engine that crawls social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, ZoomInfo, Friendster, Twitter (to name a few) as well as personal and company websites to find people's online profiles. Wink placed #3 on Time's Top 10 Websites of 2007 and PC Magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered Websites of 2007.

You have the option of searching by name, location, or key words. Doing a quick search for "Web Developer" in San Antonio yielded 58 results, most of which have pictures. They're also most likely to be the passive candidates that we so love to recruit. Want to know if your candidates are professionals by day and freaks by night? This is not a bad place to start. Wink also has a partnership with a background check/public records search company called Intelius and will allow you to purchase a detailed report on someone. Yes, it is a little creepy if you're not doing it for professional reasons.

Perhaps the biggest reason to register with Wink is to claim your online profile. Wink search results show up in Google and Yahoo searches (there is even a co-op that ties Wink into a traditional Google search). What does this mean to you? It means that you can control (to a certain extent) what people find when they search for YOUR name. Remember that night in Mexico when you had a little too much to drink and your friends thought it would be hilarious to post those pictures on the internet? You can remove those pictures from showing up in Wink search results. You can also register your other websites (LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog, etc.) with Wink to direct people to where you want to them go. I encountered a few bugs as I tried to register a few of my sites, but aside from that, I'm very pleased.

Other Wink tools available are a search field plugin for IE7 and Firefox as well as a widget that you can place on your website/blog to show people where you have profiles.

Use Wink in your recruiting efforts? Have a different use for the site? Please share your comments.