StumbleUpon finally made its SearchReviews feature official with some enhancements to boot. Launched sometime ago in major search engines, SearchReviews displays StumbleUpon star icons on search results if users have installed the StumbleUpon toolbar on their browsers. These star icons shows how popular a site is within the StumbleUpon community of users. It helps users discover great websites as the StumbleUpon blog said.
The official launch of StumbleUpon SearchReviews comes with its availability in both Firefox and Internet Browsers. The new StumbleUpon SearchReviews now displays which among your StumbleUpon friends have rated a particular site. If you have many friends who are active users of StumbleUpon, then you’d have many chances of getting sites which display those friend icons. This feature works best if you’ve managed to get many friends on your StumbleUpon network, especially if those friends are experts in their own field.
Another enhancement of the StumbleUpon SearchReviews is the expansion in coverage of internet properties. Aside from layering search results from major search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com, SearchReviews also now covers GoogleNews, Yahoo! News, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube.
To put it simply, StumbleUpon is adding value to the search results that users get from web search engines. The good thing about StumbleUpon’s SearchReviews is that it made use of pool experts from the web without actually creating a new search engine. It’s like an answer to the so called people-powered search engines with the people being StumbleUpon users themselves.
It is certainly a good move on the part of StumbleUpon. If you can’t beat the giants, just make something that these giants can make use of.
