How Stumbleupon is Beating Google, Yahoo, and MSN in Social Search
October 29th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Social MediaIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Stumbleupon is one of may favorite social media sites, Not only can it drive traffic that matches or often exceeds that of Digg, stumbleupon users are much less critical/confrontation/judgmental than the typical Digg user. In addition they are much more likely to subscribe to your blog/rss feed and click on advertising compared to other social sites. Last week they rolled out a updated toolbar that really takes social search to new level.
Above is a screen shot for a search for [yelp] on Google, the three icons next to the listing tell me someone has submitted the site to stumbleupon (the su logo disk), some people liked it (1 star = some votes, 4 stars = lots of votes), and the comic book like talk bubble tells me there is a review of the site. This has been around for a while and not new.
The addition was the RMonkeyGirl and +1 part. RMonkeyGirl is my friend Rhea Drysdale and you can learn about her primate motivated nickname here or read her columns on Search Engine Journal if you’d like. Since I’ve actually met Rhea and we’ve chatted a bit both offline and online, I’m more likely to trust something that she has given a “thumbs up” to as opposed to something with no thumbs up. Because I’ve elevated cyber stalking to an art form and as someone has said “have an insane attention to detail”, I also follow follow her on twitter and know she’s very interested in “green” or environmentally focused material. Additionally I know that anyone who wants to buy her a gift should totally buy her Planet Earth on DVD, because not only is it really good but she likes it and AFAIK doesn’t have it yet. From the screen shot below you can see she voted for it on stumbleupon.
So what have we learned here, seeing positive recommendations from your friends, is a good thing. Seeing positive recommendations from your friends about areas where they are topical experts, is much more powerful, and more importantly more click inducing. For example if you saw SERP with a result listing that Danny Sullivan voted up you’d be more inclined to click it because he’s a smart and intelligent person whos opinion you respect(except if it’s about Disney because clearly he is clearly misinformed about Disneyland being better than Disney World).
So Yahoo if I were you I’d get to work integrating delicious data into SERP’s like stumbleupon did right away, like really last week is already too late … get to work. Google kill the ridiculous ness that is personalized search, and stop with all the crappy efforts you’ve made so far in getting people to give you online bookmark data, and get to work on something that’s actually simple, useable, and benefits the users more than data borg, and people might actually use it.
Also special thanks to Rhea who let me use her as an example in this post
Sphere It
October 29th, 2007 at 10:12 am
What Firefox plugin are you using?
October 29th, 2007 at 11:20 am
You can use me anytime! (as an example that is… =D)
October 29th, 2007 at 11:23 am
@tzd not a ff plugin stumbleupon toolbar
October 29th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I’ve given up on Digg. Stumble has been my favorite for a few months now. But, there is alot of stumble trading going on a the Digital Point.
October 29th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Michael, I’ve noticed that sometimes it depends on the query as to whether or not the SU info appears. You can perform a search and get the info and then add or remove a word from the query and get the same pages in the results, but the SU info isn’t associated with the page anymore.
Any idea why?
October 29th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
nope drop the terms here or email me if you want to be more discreet, I’d love to see them
October 30th, 2007 at 1:03 am
I had so much hassle with it trying to open in Firefox that I gave up trying to figure it out. Maybe I am a little slow and a little old, but if it doesn’t come easy to me I move on. There are so many new things to explore.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
TZD…the Stumble info will show up in the serp if you have the Stumbleupon toolbar running when doing the search.
November 1st, 2007 at 12:30 am
Stumbleup does a fine job matching people and web sites together. It is also a great reference for folks to begin to understand understand the difference between social search and Google. I can remember clearly how impressed I was with the sites served up the first time I went a stumbling.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Thanks for sharing this. I admit, I haven’t used stumbleupon that much, though I have used it. But not that frequently as Digg. I am changing my perspective now, thanks.
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:11 am
I completely agree about StumbleUpon being better than Digg in a lot of ways. It seems too that there is a much broader variety of users as well.
November 9th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
That’s very interesting, have you found that you get more traffic from Stumbleupon than from websearches?
I know you said that you get more than from Digg, but what about Google?
Thanks
Tyler
November 11th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Thanks for sharing your views. I’m not exactly an SU geek, but the way it’s outgrowing will certainly make me one.