StumbleUpon finally made its SearchReviews feature official with some enhancements to boot. Launched sometime ago in major search engines, SearchReviews displays StumbleUpon star icons on search results if users have installed the StumbleUpon toolbar on their browsers. These star icons shows how popular a site is within the StumbleUpon community of users. It helps users discover great websites as the StumbleUpon blog said.
The official launch of StumbleUpon SearchReviews comes with its availability in both Firefox and Internet Browsers. The new StumbleUpon SearchReviews now displays which among your StumbleUpon friends have rated a particular site. If you have many friends who are active users of StumbleUpon, then you’d have many chances of getting sites which display those friend icons. This feature works best if you’ve managed to get many friends on your StumbleUpon network, especially if those friends are experts in their own field.
Another enhancement of the StumbleUpon SearchReviews is the expansion in coverage of internet properties. Aside from layering search results from major search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com, SearchReviews also now covers GoogleNews, Yahoo! News, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube.
To put it simply, StumbleUpon is adding value to the search results that users get from web search engines. The good thing about StumbleUpon’s SearchReviews is that it made use of pool experts from the web without actually creating a new search engine. It’s like an answer to the so called people-powered search engines with the people being StumbleUpon users themselves.
It is certainly a good move on the part of StumbleUpon. If you can’t beat the giants, just make something that these giants can make use of.
Comments
5 responses so far ↓
Wayne Smallman on Oct 23, 2007 at 6:35 am
When I look at what StumbleUpon are doing, I see a missed opportunity for Google, who have much the same infrastructure in place (i.e.: a tool bar), but with a much, much bigger audience.
Problem is, Google just don’t get social media at all. And rather than consolidate their own search assets, they’ve effectively given over to a third party to add the real value…
digitalnomad on Oct 23, 2007 at 9:59 am
I think that’s great news… and Wayne is right.
Loren Baker, Editor on Oct 23, 2007 at 10:29 am
“Google News, Yahoo! News, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube”
Truly amazing and a great way to blanket the results while exposing the power of StumbleUpon to their millions of users during the everyday routines of those users outside of StumbleUpon.
Marc Beharry on Oct 24, 2007 at 10:48 am
I have been enjoying the benefits of this for a while.
Finding out what actual people think of a site before I click it in the search results is priceless.
I agree that Google dropped the ball with this one.
Marcis on Nov 29, 2007 at 4:16 am
Google is missing not only that, great idea
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