StumbleUpon…The Interest Searching!
For the Internet savvy people like you and me, search engines form a very important part of web surfing. We are always on a look out for new stuff and that too which is of our interest. How we, sometimes, wish that our most loved search engines understood our requirements and need and gave us what we have been looking for, without making us scroll through millions of webpages or thousands of websites. And then God sent us an angel to help us out- StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is an online internet community consisting of people who share similar interests. It is like a personalized recommendation engine that works closely with principles of collaborative filtering. This technique helps you find out only those websites which StumbleUpon thinks might interest you.
The Stumbling Procedure
When you become a member of the StumbleUpon, you are allowed to rate a particular webpage or a website using either a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. As you use StumbleUpon more and more often, your personalized search engine also understands your interests, liking and disliking better. Now when you click on the ‘stumble’ button located on your browser window’s toolbar, the results that are displayed to you are based on your previous ratings of different webpages, ratings by your friends and ratings by the other StumbleUpon users who have interests similar to yours.
StumbleUpon has more than 500 different topics to choose from. It is using these topics that you can actually indicate your interests and preferences. This helps StumbleUpon to present to you more and more relevant data every single time you decide to ‘Stumble’.
This is how StumbleUpon combines human opinions with machine learning to give you the best kind of virtual community that you would love to be a part of. Also, it is compatible with all the major browsers such as the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla etc.
Moreover, StumbleUpon uses the help from the ratings by its users to maintain its database. This means that it updates its database from time to time to give its users only high quality website results. These are decided by the users’ preferences for a particular kind of websites. The sites with low ratings and low rankings are automatically deleted from StumbleUpon database.
It does not come as a surprise to any of us that StumbleUpon has more than five million users and it has already collected its five-billionth ‘stumble’. Owing to such huge popularity, e-bay purchasing the rights for StumbleUpon for a whopping $75,000,000, does not seem to be a bad deal after all!
The ‘Stumble’ services
StumbleUpon launched its StumbleVideo site in December 2006. Here, users can submit their videos that they would like to share with others and the other users can rate them. It also aggregates videos from YouTube, Google, Metacafe and MySpace. In 2007, it launched the StumbleThru service. It allows the users to navigate through pages of various sites such as Wikipedia, The Onion etc.
With so much to choose from, getting down to Stumbling seems like a very good idea to me. This one is surely worth a try!