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Is StumbleUpon better than Google?

Started by mathewi · 1 year ago

StumbleUpon — the social app that lets you randomly click your way through the Web, or through a particular subject area, and then vote for the sites you hit — has launched an expansion of its SearchReviews feature, which has actually been around for awhile. As a dedica ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • Jason

    1 year ago

    StumbleUpon is very, very cool... unfortunately, when it comes to search most users are not going to install toolbars or use features like this (at least not today). Same with delicious... very cool for folks in the top 1-3% of the audience, but not very useful for the masses. I think semantic search has the same challenge: folks don't want to fill out a form to get their results. They want to type one or two words into a box and get a big reward.... with Mahalo they get that.

    That being said, folks building Mahalo pages use delicious and stumble upon all the time to find interesting links to include on our pages. I think social bookmarking and editorial search do overlap in terms of themes, but just not for end users.

    best j
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  • Mathew

    1 year ago

    Thanks for the comment, Jason -- you have a point there. I keep forgetting that I am not the average Web user, nor are most of my friends :-)
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  • MG Siegler

    1 year ago

    One of the very interesting things in all of this is that Google actually had a StumbleUpon or sorts in place before StumbleUpon did.

    I think this is one of the few times where Google dropped the ball on the potential of a new service...
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  • thatedeguy

    1 year ago

    I think another interesting issue is the recent downgrading of PR based on whether a site sells links or not. I think that makes it unreliable at best. Stumble upon gets us around that. Maybe we need a metric that combines the two...

    Jason: Last time I checked, Mahalo was a social search site. Seems to me that the 3.7 million users of stumbleupon would be your core group of users. And, frankly, you can throw out the bottom 50% of users as they're going to use whatever search engine is convenient. e.g. Google.

    Mathew: we may not be the average web user, but those like us usually make or break many of these companies.
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  • Mathew

    1 year ago

    That's true, MG -- and didn't Google also launch a sort of randomization-type feature earlier this year that was kind of a Stumble knock-off? I haven't seen much about that since it was announced.
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  • MG Siegler

    1 year ago

    Yep, Google Dice back in April - don't know anyone that uses it - certainly not enough to talk about even when it's essentially the same thing as StumbleUpon.
    reply

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