Ever since StumbleUpon spun itself off from eBay last April, it’s been reinventing itself at a rapid pace. In June, it launched Su.pr, its own URL shortening service, but that was just an interesting new product. Today, it is starting to roll out a major redesign that recasts the service as a social search engine “somewhere between a Twitter and Google,” says founder Garrett Camp.
About 8 million people a month use StumbleUpon, says Camp, to bookmark and share the best sites on the Web. More than 35 million Web pages have been stumbled, and now the company has indexed them all to make them more searchable. The homepage has also been simplified to show you a stream of pages recently stumbled by people you know. New StumbleUpon users will see the redesign immediately, while existing users can switch by clicking here.
Traditionally, people went to StumbleUpon to randomly flip through interesting pages, but now it works more like a proper search engine. Except that it only returns pages already deemed to be worthy by the StumbleUpon community, and then within those results it shows you the pages that only people you subscribe to have Stumbled, rated, or reviewed. In that sense, it is like Yahoo’s now-defunct MyWeb experiment (but with actual users).
You can sort results by everyone, just your friends, or just your own Stumbles. And the new Discover tab lets you sort by most recent stumbles from your friends, top rated stumbles, most shared, or by topic. “It is halfway between search and discovery,” says Camp. “It is not as comprehensive as Google and not as realtime as Twitter.” The idea, rather, is to add a social layer to search without all the noise you get on Twitter.
StumbleUpon will also be releasing a new version of its toolbar later this week, which will add these social search features, as well as the ability to share links on Facebook and Twitter (using a Su.pr URL). Also the toolbar, like before, shows a little StumbleUpon icon on Google search results next to links that have been Stumbled. But it will support new sites including, Bing, CNN.com, Yahoo News, and the New York Times.
Will the fact that you can actually purchase stumbles corrupt this system?
@Chad: I don’t think it does what you think it does
Advertiser content is ranked just as any other content, and bad content gets downranked and purged from the system very quickly.
you can’t do a thumbs down for a paid stumble. It gives the message “this is new site. Please give it a thumbs up to add it” or something like that. Can’t remember the exact wording.
nah.
If you want to see a “Social Search Engine” that is Powered by Google and rocks searches for Twitter and Facebook….you should check out
Twuugle.com
This is a search engine that is based off Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Latent Search Indexing.
You can search Everything in Twitter and they have just released Facebook Search
This Social Media Search engine Rocks….best one I have found!
Cheers,
Jon
Too funny i.e. sounds like marketing desperation to try and find relevance.
Seriously? Seems like a great idea that will make the service significantly more useful. I haven’t kept up with it over the years, but I’m going back to check it out as soon as I’m done typing this…
This is pretty good. They are making some big leaps, congrats to them.
I’ve been using SU much more over the last couple of weeks. I really like it. Very good results, and I’ve built a very nice library of technical material (bash, latex, c/c++, etc.) . All very high quality sites.
are you using it for discovery of pages/sites or as a marketer? just curious.
I liked that StumbleUpon has always been it’s own thing. This description just sounds like Digg to me/
I will never use StumbleUpon simply because I hate it’s stupid name.
I saw this coming and blogged about it almost 3 years ago. http://cranials...-of-future.html
And you announce it today.
Glad to see it finally officially happened.
I’m surprised there aren’t more comments here.
I just spent some time on the new Stumble and I love it! Great move by them, IMO.
This is definitly a very good move. I am big fan of StumbleUpon and found a lot of really good pages there.
This. Is. Awesome.
Nice work SU!
I think it’s a massive improvement. The content is much more varied than over at Digg and this system allows greater ease of use.
I just tried out the new StumbleUpon….and I did not like it….it gave me a bunch of weird pages with subjects totally different than I normally get….and there were no pages with pictures. Also…it didn’t give me any other stumbler’s sites to look at…and took away the colored background in my favorites. I switched back to the old StumbleUpon…hope we have a choice to keep it if we want it.
I think SU is eventually going to be the best and biggest social media outlet.