According to TechCrunch, eBay is all set to acquire StumbleUpon, a popular web discovery site which helps users find new sites, and more recently videos. It’s often described as “channel surfing” on the web.Rumor has it that the price is anywhere from $40–45 million or higher, and Google and AOL were also said to be in on the talks.
The same thoughts are going through my head right now with this deal as when eBay acquired Skype– they don’t exactly seem like the perfect match. It will definitely be interesting to see what eBay has in-store for StumbleUpon and how this will benefit them. While none of this has been confirmed, TechCruch says that people close do the deal are talking, and it’s imminent.
Also interesting is that Google just announced their queryless search. Yes, that’s right, it sounds like they’re taking on StumbleUpon. Convenient timing, isn’t it? It’s integrated into the Google Toolbar and it will appear as a pair of dice. When you click on the logo, you will get a site recommendation based upon your Google Search History.Google will give you up to 50 recommendations per day.
Another queryless search option they’re giving you is to get recommendations right from your Google Personalized Homepage. You can “Add a Tab,” then type “recommendations” as the tab name, and then you’ll get a page of recommendations that are updated everyday. If you don’t have Search History enabled, neither of these services will work for you.
Source:Google Blogoscoped
Also, for the Google Recommendations, you can add a module with the source as [google.com]
As a matter of fact, searching the “Home Page Content Directory” (available from the “add stuff” link) a search for “recommendations” will return several module for Google recommendations including news, gadgets, pages, groups, and more.
It’s interesting that they’re basing it upon search history, and I think I prefer StumbleUpon’s method of selecting categories that interest you.
Yea I agree. It doesn’t really seem like even the same thing as Stumbleupon, not really. As a commenter on TechCrunch pointed out too, what happens when you don’t make a lot of Google searches? I actually don’t either, I have lots of bookmarks and RSS feeds and besides the occasional search for something I can’t find, my search history is mostly windows error messages too, process names, and addresses and phone number searches on Google maps. If its only using my past search history to choose sites to show me, its not going to come up with much variety. I too greatly prefer Stumbleupon’s method of letting me choose category’s of sites that I want to see, because most of the time the sites I’m shown is stuff I would never think of searching for anyway and never find on my own. Anyway, yea nice new feature of Google toolbar, but its hardly a competitor to Stumbleupon in my book.
I think Google probably wants it to be considered a competitor, but I really don’t think it will do very well. StumbleUpon has made a good name for themselves and they’ve got a lot of fans spreading the word to others to give it a try.
Google is probably trying to use this as a tool to get more people to use the Google Search History feature. I’m sure it was pretty simple for them to implement, and gives people more of a reason to allow Google to track their search history.
I’ll admit that I do use the Google Search History even though everyone tells me that I shouldn’t. People say that I’m just giving Google more information than they need to know, but I use my search history to find things that I have previously searched for. It is an amazingly useful feature, and I could really care less if Google knows what I’m searching for.