StumbleUpon, the service that lets you find and recommend interesting sites, works mostly by using a plugin for your browser (Internet Explorer and Firefox). StumbleUpon updated their plugin, by integrating their metadata into search results from Google and Yahoo.
If you enable that option, you'll see a rating (from one star to
three five stars), a link to reviews and the topic of the site. While the topic may be obvious (in the example from the screenshot), the rating and the reviews are useful to decide if the information from that page is valid, reliable, or just to see what others people think about a site. I'm not suggesting that "the voice of the crowd" should be followed, but it's always interesting to see other opinions.
It is not true that the rating is one to three. Try this one for example http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=reader+google&btnG=Search
ReplyDeleteYou're right. wikipedia.org has five stars, so I assume this is the maximum.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was just grand, but over the past few weeks I have found that StumbleUpon has "un-Integrated with my Google Search Engine and I no longer get a star rating or indication of reviews.
ReplyDeleteFor that matter I can't get the StumbleUpon Search to work either... It won't give any results now. It makes me sad. I was starting to enjoy that integration and the StumbleUpon Search as much as I have enjoyed StumbleUpon.
I started using it as much as I use Google.ca.
I live in Australia and as far as I can see, the SearchLinks only work when using the US google.com site to search. Sometimes Google automatically forwards your search to a localised country domain.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally I've created a Customised StumbleUpon Search while they work on fixing their own search.
Who designates these stars? I see sites with 3 thumbs up have one star, and sites with one thumb up have three ...
ReplyDeleteStars are based on a variety of parameters... number of thumbs up, reviews, domain popularity and several additional parameters within the StumbleUpon algorithm.
ReplyDelete