StumbleUpon steps up online discovery service
StumbleUpon stepped up its personalized Website recommendation
service on Wednesday by launching an online query page and alliances
that include The Huffington Post and Rolling Stone.
Unlike Google, Yahoo and other search engines designed to help people
efficiently scour the Internet with specific targets in mind,
StumbleUpon's "discovery engine" finds websites that promise to appeal
to users' passions.
"Search is really powerful when you know what you're looking for,"
StumbleUpon general manager Michael Buhr told AFP.
"Discovery is more about when you want to explore your interests. It
is not about needing to find something now."
StumbleUpon has more than six million people using it routinely and
the "average stumbler is stumbling" about ten times daily, as compared
to the twice a day average racked-up by users of online search engines,
according to Buhr.
Prior to Wednesday, StumbleUpon was available as a toolbar that could
be added to Web browsers used to navigate the Internet. Now, people can
"stumble" by visiting www.StumbleUpon.com.
The eBay-owned company has also arranged to put its technology to
work letting people "stumble" about The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone,
National Geographic and howstuffworks websites.
The discovery technology combines peer recommendations, mathematics
and social networking to figure out which online content in any given
topic might most appeal to a particular user.
Registering with the service is free and as people venture about the
Internet they indicate which content they like and which they dislike,
letting StumbleUpon learn their preferences.
Websites that users like are added to the StumbleUpon database from
which recommendations are made.
There are reportedly 21 million websites listed in the StumbleUpon
database.
"Business is growing really well," Buhr said, noting the number of
users has doubled in the past year. "We really believe we have critical
mass now."
People can stumble within websites, for example asking the service to
find them videos in YouTube, photos in Flickr, or music in MySpace.
"You can say which people on StumbleUpon are friends and we
incorporate their choices into what you might like," Buhr said. "We
harness algorithms and social recommendations to find what will be
interesting to you."
StumbleUpon makes money through advertiser-sponsored pages that are
recommended "a small percentage of the time" to online explorers.
If an advertiser-sponsored page is not well received, it is pulled,
according to Buhr.
StumbleUpon was founded in 2001 in Canada and moved to San Francisco,
where it was bought by eBay in May of 2007 for 75 million dollars. There
have been recent unconfirmed reports that eBay is considering selling
the firm.
AFP |