Now this is an interesting development to an already busy day: Google has released a “stumble” like feature into their toolbar.
Google has been tracking user queries for several years now. However, this tracking was mostly unused, at least not as a readily visible enhancement. But today, Google added a new “My Picks” button into the Google Toolbar. It works by showing you pages that other people, similar to you, have visited.
Stumble is based off of user submitted content, whereas Google’s tool works in automation. I use Google to do a lot of programming related querying, so will I see nothing but Java reference pages? Not likely. From my interpretation of things, it also tracks general browsing behavior of its toolbar users to determine what to show. So it might correlate me to users of Slashdot, and thus send me to a recently popular article there. I arrive at this conclusion based on the second feature Google introduced today: a customized Personalized Homepage tab.
For people who don’t have the toolbar installed, they can still check out the feature by adding a “recommendations” tab to their personalized homepage (see image). As you can see, it has recommended groups, videos, and even news. Clearly this stuff isn’t necessarily content that is searched for, but likely content that is being browsed by toolbar users. If so, this is an impressive union of products by Google and lives up to their recent commitment to integrating their products instead of creating new ones.
I’m glad to see Google finally utilizing this data in a more interesting way. It was like a treasure chest they didn’t want to open or something.
The timing of all of this is very weird. It was only hours ago that the rumor broke that eBay was about to buy StumbleUpon. So where’s this put eBay and StumbleUpon?
It puts the $40M+ buyout into perspective. It’s possible that Stumble saw this coming and wanted to be bought out ASAP. Meanwhile, eBay wanted a foothold into the toolbar market so that they could get a piece of the toolbar search market pie. I still think eBay could have spent their money better, but for all intents and purposes StumbleUpon investors made a safe bet by cashing out.
I can’t say the same for eBay. By eBay’s logic, any big website should buyout any other toolbar makers in an attempt to steal search traffic from Google.
Of course, Yahoo and Microsoft can tell you why such a plan is completely futile, at least right now. After all, they have their own toolbars, dedicated search technology, strong brand recognition, and made several notable enhancements to their search engines in the past year, yet they are still bleeding away market share.
Note: I would have used a screen shot of my own recommendations, but I have had search history tracking disabled for some time now. Perhaps in a few days I’ll see able to see what sort of stuff Google recommends.