By: Tim Bajarin
Sites like StumbleUpon add a dimension of entertainment to the art of searching.
A lot of guys are flippers, taking command of the TV remote and cycling through the channels to find out what’s on. I’m no exception. Unless I’m invested in a particular movie or TV show, I can go through every single channel attempting to find something that interests me. It drives my wife crazy and usually gets me banished from the living room. I get sent to my study where I’m free to channel surf to my heart’s content. I’m told this quirk has a name: “channel surfing syndrome.”
Is there an equivalent to channel surfing on the Web? Most of us tend to surf through bookmarked sites and search engines when we’re looking for something. Recently, however, I discovered a site called StumbleUpon. The site helps feed my channel surfing habits. It’s one of the most addictive Websites I’ve ever used.
StumbleUpon lets users set up topics in at least 17 categories. In each there are at least a dozen sub-topics to choose from. When you go to any of the topics under Sports and hit Stumble on the bar, they will bring you to a site about that sport. You can also set your preferences to Food and Cooking, Hobbies, Travel, TV, Movies, and more. Each time you hit the Stumble button, it will cycle through your interests.
As a foodie, there’s another site I visit that offers a similar feature. It’s called Foodgawker. On it, you can find pictures of every type of food imaginable—and the recipes behind them. There are also two sister sites, Weddinggawker and Craftgawker. Sites like ehow and Sutree, meanwhile, organize all manner of information and video demonstrating how to do just about anything.
These sites have something very important in common. They deliver a form of discovery and organization to a diverse and disorganized online world. The Web has become completely unruly as new blogs and Websites pop up each day, further cluttering this vast world of digital information. Search engines were initially conceived to bring some semblance of order to the Web. They still deliver key information, but as good as they are, they don’t really organize the discovery for the user.
Organized discovery is important. It will be critical to the future of Web search. There is just too much information at our fingertips, and we don’t have a great way to “discover” the content that we really want. Sure we have important news, sports, and blogs that take information and aggregate it to make it more accessible, and that will continue to be an important part of the discovery process. So will newsletters and e-mail.
This process can become a powerful way to find things you didn’t even know existed. I don’t know how may times I clicked the Stumble button to find a cool site I was not aware of. Also, since I put pictures of baby animals in my preferences, I do a lot of oohing and aahing when I visit the site.
Of course, it’s the technological framework that makes StumbleUpon so powerful. It can comb the Internet based on what I find interesting. I think the company has something really important here. This could be the medium that turns search into entertainment. When I use a search engine, I want to find information as quickly as possible. With StumbleUpon, I just peruse the Web. The site’s approach is still broad. I often spend hours letting it guide me. It also has a feature that lets you e-mail friends the sites you like.
In the future, this framework can be tied to areas of specific interest. In the iTunes App Store, for example, there are more than 200,000 programs. Currently, you can go to the App Store and search by category. But what if StumbleUpon was tied to the store? Searching would entertaining.
Pehaps the future of search will include “Entertainment Search,” a way to make the searching process more engaging. Search as we know it won’t go away, and in fact will likely become evensmarter. However, thanks to technologies like the one behind StumbleUpon, it may become a whole lot more interesting, as well.