StumbleUpon Personalizes Site & Video Search Edit
SearchReviews

StumbleUpon, the web browsing and social bookmarking tool owned by eBay, announced this week that it would be adding SearchReviews, a feature allows search engine users to see a site’s rating by application users.

The service will work with Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Ask, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube searches, integrating a star ranking system based on Stumbler ratings. So far, there have been 13 million pages reviewed by 3.7 million registered “stumblers.”

StumbleUpon is a web surfing toolbar requiring a membership to make random browsing online more tailored to your needs. After listing your interests, users can “Stumble Upon” millions of sites and videos reviewed by other community members. They can either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The more positive reviews a site gets, the more it gets passed on. A site can only receive so many thumbs down before its adventures bouncing around cyberspace end. There are a wide variety of other tools as well.

When registered Stumble users use any of the mentioned search engines, SearchReviews kicks in. “If any of the resulting websites have been reviewed by the StumbleUpon community, they will be denoted by a logo, star rating and link to user reviews,” Techland said.

“The stumbling technology could eventually be a welcome innovation for the startup’s parent company. As eBay faces a dropoff in sales growth in its domestic online auction business, SearchReviews could potentially help people window shop on eBay and discover products they wouldn’t have found otherwise,” the blog said.

“For now the startup is launching SearchReviews without the collaboration of the search giants.” 

“The new SearchReviews feature was born of the realization that the company can’t compete with the major players like Google and Yahoo,” Techland said, then quoted StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp, “But StumbleUpon can improve what’s already there,”

eBay bought StumbleUpon in May for $75 million.

For a video review of StumbleUpon, check out the clip embedded.