Search is on for better searches

Search is the great avenue for interesting experiments and tech investment on the Web. If any company comes up with the ultimate search tool that knows how to find exactly what you want without wasting your time, it’ll be the million-dollar baby.

The hunt for such a killer application is especially focused now in the area of “personal search,” meaning tools that can find out just about anything you want to know about someone.

Two sites testing new ground in that area are Wink.com and Upscoop.com. The first wants to be an all-purpose Web searcher, finding profiles of people based on their presence on social network sites, such as Bebo and LinkedIn. It claims it’s indexed about 200 million personal profiles.

Users search based on name, geography and other criteria (company, school, whatever) and see results from major social networks. Users sign in, claim their Wink profile and take “ownership” of various profiles on social networks by entering the e-mail they use for those accounts. It reportedly also tracks your mention on sites like Twitter and Wikipedia.

So we tried searching for Ichiro. We found the star Seattle Mariners outfielder has pages on Friendster and on MySpace, but not Facebook. Certainly, one would have been able to find this out through other means, but maybe not so quickly. On the other hand, Wink didn’t find anything else out about Ichiro worth noting.

Upscoop does something quite different. You plug in your e-mail address and then the address book you use (from Outlook, Gmail, AOL or whichever). Upscoop goes out and tracks networks that link you to your contacts.