derick.in

I started using Stumbleupon a couple of months back. Something which amazed me was that they delivered what they promise : Yes, you will come across a lot of websites which otherwise, you would not have ever visited. And without mentioning you might have understood that I became a huge fan of Stumbleupon.

One of the cool things I have noticed after installing Stumbleupon toolbar is the modification of Google Search results page to reflect the stumble ratings. Take this for example:

When I search for ‘free wordpress themes’ Google returns a list of pages which it thinks as more relevant. But as you can see in the screen shot that, Stumbleupon ratings has also been appended to the list. You might have noticed that the first Google result is rated a single star and the result number seven in Google is having an awesome five star rating. So now the real question is “Which Result Should I Prefer? Google or Stumbleupon?”.

My personal experience persuades me to choose Stumbleupon result. Why? Some of the things which comes into my mind right away are:

1. Search results are often manipulated by some SEO tricks. We have seen some examples recently about some Google Search results giving not so relevant information for some popular search.
2. Social bookmark results are recommended by people who know about the subject. In case of Stumbleupon, the user can choose the subjects which he/she is interested.
3. Good social bookmark rank is a collective effort of many users worldwide. Hence it is very difficult to do some manipulations. If you try to promote a site , then social bookmark sites will send more traffic to that site, where other users will see the content and they will vote for/against that site. So if someone tries to manipulate the results, more and more people will vote it down.

In this post I have used Stumbleupon as an example only. This is true in the case of every other site. And this is why I think Google recently announced a move to add some social networking feature to the search engine listing. But what if the page is not listed in Google at the first instant? Will Google allow people to add a site to results for a particular search? Can we see the results soon? Let us wait and watch what is going to come in the next few months. I think that everyone needs to have a social aspect to their web related activities to survive in Web 2.0 era!