Alright, recently I have not been as honest and as forthcoming as I should have been about this. However the only reason I am doing this is because I thought it would be nice to keep this Canadian gem to myself, just for a while before it hit the internet high street. Did I really say Canadian??! Yes, it’s time to take your ear muffs off. This may be a serious future contender for the Google space, they are so tiny compared to Google at the moment with under 1,9 million users a pittance to Google however they have grown at a phenomenal rate of 127% since July 2006.I know you may rely on people like me to tell you something as important as this, but I was just in compliance with the unwritten code of universal bloggers. “You shall not spill anything against Google untill we have made all enough AdSense revenue to give up the day job”.

However it is official according to the Wall Street Journal ‘Stumble Upon’ delivers better search results then Google. “Next time you want to wander the Web, forget about Googling it. Stumble it.”

First of all it is important to know that Stumble Upon is a Search Engine (duh), second of all its a plug-in for Firefox users and IE, thirdly it is community based (that’s the 2007 buzz word). If the technology of this fine machine gets you fired up you may view it here.

” StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,959,891 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”

The major difference between Google and Stumble Upon is that the latter relies on intuitive search whilst Google still tends to clog up the drains with a lot of nonsense sites. The fact is that the whole need for SEO (search engine optimization) has now been disrupted and the people at Razorfish may need to re-think their 5 year plans. I mean lets face the facts here, what kind of a market is lead by the economics of search?
My rationalization on this subject is that placement of a website or brand at the top of the search engines listings was rarely about firms which provide a good quality service or product, its about who hired the best SEO people to get their website listed. This staus quo is outdated by Generation C and Twinsumers whose purchasing decisions are increasingly being determined by word of mouth, peer-to-peer, price-comparisons, opinions, reviews, ratings and recommendations. The relevancy of my search results on Google is worsened each day that SEO firms get better at understanding Google.

Advertising on StumbleUpon
When paying for ads on StumbleUpon you’re not buying ad-space as you would in other campaigns - what you’re paying for is an increased weighting within their engine - so an increased percentage of users will be directed to a page you specify (again based around their loose tagging system). So you could set up a campaign directing users to a page about Vista and tag it as “operating system” and “windows” and get semi-targetted traffic. The quality of traffic from social bookmarking sites is debatable but you are going to get targetted visitors… You can take a look at how this works here.

The only critique I would make on Stumble Upon is that they may need to add a time limit on sessions as it is the singular most addictive experience I have had since smoking. Please give it a try but be forewarned:-)

http://www.stumbleupon.com