StumbleUpon SearchReviews: social rankings of search engine results

StumbleUpon is moving beyond the browser toolbar. The social ranking service lets users give web sites a thumbs up or down, write reviews, and find random popular websites by clicking a "Stumble!" button.

Now StumbleUpon is launching a SearchReviews feature that will allow users to see StumbleUpon member reviews next to search results from Google, Yahoo!, Ask, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube. If you've got the StumbleUpon toolbar installed, you may already be seeing the little green SU box next to selected search results. If not, click Tools, then Toolbar Options. Next click the configuration tag and check the box that says "Highly recommended search results."

Because millions StumbleUpon users have been ranking pages for the past few years, the system already has a pretty good list of rankings for many of the web sites, images, and videos you're likely to find during your daily searches. So if you trust the wisdom of crowds and only click on links with positive ratings, SearchReviews could make search engines a lot more useful.

On the other hand, since StumbleUpon is really just overlaying their data on top of Google and other pages in your search browser, the service has no control over what pages you find when using popular search engines. For example, the most popular page among StumbleUpon users for a particular topic might be buried on Google's 5th page of search results, in which case you'll never find it using SearchReviews.

The StumbleUpon Toolbar works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Tags: search-engines, SearchReviews, StumbleUpon