Posted on 10/07/2007 7:10:39 AM PDT by vietvet67
IF you know what you’re looking for online, Google and other Internet search engines do a pretty good job of helping you find it. But what if you don’t know exactly what you want?
Say you are a soccer fan, but you are neither in the market for new cleats nor in search of the buzz on Greg Ryan, the coach of the United States women’s team. Instead, you just want to see interesting soccer sites. Googling “interesting soccer” or “great soccer stuff” is not likely to be satisfying.
A Web service called StumbleUpon has spent the last six years trying to satisfy such a need, perfecting a formula to help you discover content you are likely to find interesting. You tell the service about your professional interests or your hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them. As you “stumble” from site to site, you will feel as if you are channel-surfing the Internet, or rather, a corner of the Internet that is most relevant to you.
Web discovery, or search without a query, is still a niche activity, but StumbleUpon’s growth to 3.5 million registered users from 600,000 two years ago suggests it is on a path to becoming more mainstream.
“We’ve seen over the last few years a growing population of people who are online and aren’t exactly sure what they’re looking for,” said Michael Buhr, the general manager of StumbleUpon. “That’s what discovery is about.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Searching the internet isn’t rocket science.
tell us all about yourself. we’ll keep everything just between us, OK?
“
The way the internet is, I’d bet is is most likely going to result in porn.”
No longer true. I use google ten times a day and have never stumbled upon a porn site. What search engine are you using?
I usually use yahoo. Sometimes when I can’t find something with that I’ll switch to other engines.
If times have changed, then that’s awesome. I remember in Middle School having a computer class. We had to do some research on the White House (Which President was 21? Questions like that). What the teacher was unaware of was a certain porn site with “Whitehouse” as part of the URL. Needless to say, the internet filters failed that day. The URL was basically the same, except one had .com and the other was .gov
While I have no need for a new tool bar. Scroll to the bottom of the StumbleUpon page and click on games, here’s a couple of tough ones....
http://www.robmathiowetz.com/
http://home.scarlet.be/~bbonte/factoryballs.html
bmflr
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