StumbleUpon has launched SearchReviews, a new feature that allows you to discover interesting content anywhere you search. This brings the power of StumbleUpon’s unique recommendation and personalization engine and active social community to traditional search results.
The SearchReviews service layers peer-endorsement, site ratings, and reviews next to the search results. If you’re a StumbleUpon user like me, you can enhance and personalize your entire search experience to see which search results your friends recommend.
What’s very cool about the SearchReviews service is that you see star ratings next to sites, along with icons indicating which of your friends have given the sites a “thumbs up” rating. This info “personalizes the search results” without making you change your search behavior.
SearchReviews is available to all StumbleUpon users as you use different web properties, including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask. Also, you can find SearchReviews on GoogleNews, Yahoo! News, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube.
SearchReviews is available on both Firefox and Internet Explorer beginning today, October 23. For more information about SearchReviews, check out the StumbleUpon blog located here.
At first, when I went to check out the new feature, I found that it wasn’t working for me. I had to go install the latest version of the Firefox add-on first. Then, after going to Google, it still didn’t work. So, I went to the settings option on the StumbleUpon toolbar and then had to literally “turn it on”. So, you might want to do this in order to get it working properly. Here’s a screen capture of the settings:
Once you have the settings configured properly, you can then go to Google and do a search–you will see which sites have already be Stumbled by your friends. What’s interesting, though, you can actually do a search and see which sites are NOT Stumbled yet by others, allowing you to recommend even more sites to friends.
Here is what it looks like when you do a search for my name along with the StumbleUpon SearchReviews option turned on:
If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that there’s a few graphics right next to the search result.
StumbleUpon has over 3.7 million users and there’s about 7.5 million stumbles per day and about 12 million of the best websites on the Internet — all submitted and rated by StumbleUpon’s users.