Today I received a invite from stumbleupon for testing out their new feature “explore”, that’s not really new its always been there but its available only with the toolbar in the name of “search” now they have created a page for that purpose, and like google does it is suggesting results, once you select your search term and hit enter/submit – it will start suggesting relevant websites for you, it is simply like clicking “I am feeling lucky” in google search instead of “search” button, only difference is with google when you press “I am feeling lucky” and land in the website that is dead end, if you want to try another website search again in google but with stumbleupon you can press “stumble” button unless you get the exact website you want to see.

whats impressive with stumbleupon explore is, the relevance of the website to our searched term is very high and best of all the quality of the website is high too as if it was hand picked, actually the results are handpicked with stumbleupon.

let us explore how stumbleupon works, stumbleupon provides us users a toolbar that can be installed for web browsers, it has three main buttons “topic selector”, “like” and “dislike” whenever we select a topic it will suggest us with the websites, now based on the searched topic and users need they will press either “like” or “dislike” button, image millions of users doing this, that is for a particular topic, you will first see the content suggested by millions of people in the topic. and time goes by you will get even more suggestions based on your previous searches, friends, and interest and I am not sure about this I heard they have this algorithm “what time what you like” pretty cool rite?

now back to my actual blog topic, it is very important we rank our website for stumbleupon for the relevant topics, and most of all, we should have the relevant quality content in the website.

stumbleupon is very smart enough to find out if you are using same id and suggesting same website for too many topics, initially you might get couple of 10’s traffic initially, but that never picks up and slowly goes down, if you are wondering what happened, users visited your website and clicked “dislike” button and stumbleupon is suspecting if ur website is good for the selected topic and stopped suggesting when searched. so be smart enough to create decently good and useful content, and build stumbleupon network to perform likes.