Wink people search engine has doubled the number of searchable people profiles to 500 million in just one year’s time. Within the next year, the company expects to exceed more than one billion profiles. This growth is a testament to the meteoric rise of social networking worldwide.

Wink’s people search is the largest people search engine and cooperates with the world’s largest social networks including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Twitter and more to power its robust search capabilities.

“However, with this growth comes the overwhelming volume of information that makes it more complicated and time consuming to find people across millions of profiles scattered throughout different online communities. Our people search technology leverages advanced search criteria to make it fast and easy to find and stay connected with people around the world.” said Michael Tanne, Wink’s CEO.

Wink People Search enables people across the world to search for friends or business contacts based on name, location, interests, tags, school, work, and other profile information. Wink also provides users with tools to manage their online presence and control what is displayed about them on the Web.

Whether a user wants to find an old friend, classmate, or colleague, locate fans of his or her hometown football team, or seek out people who share certain hobbies and interests, Wink searches hundreds of millions of people profiles from across the Internet to help anyone learn about and connect with others. Wink’s patent-pending PeopleRank technology analyzes people’s input to continually refine the search results.

Wink wants to be a search engine with human ratings. Wink’s indexing is not simply pulling from MySpace’s search features, they’ve actually indexed more than 100 million profiles. Wink’s results aren’t limited to social networks; it found the personal web pages of most people I tried as well.