StumbleUpon Breaks Out SearchReviews Overlay

Users of the popular web browsing discovery tool StumbleUpon can rate and review the results of searches with the new SearchReviews feature.

Reviews and ratings by fellow StumbleUpon users may be viewed by enabling SearchReviews. This additional content generated by StumbleUpon users will show up on results from Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live Search, Ask, and AOL.

Also, SearchReviews can be found on Google News, Yahoo! News, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube. When sources in the search results have been rated by StumbleUpon users, or reviewed, icons will appear for the site’s star rating and friends of the person who like the site.

The big focus for SearchReviews goes deeper than the icons showing up in search results for sites. StumbleUpon, like its owner eBay, is pushing the social aspects of the service. Their blog entry emphasized the friend features available:

This layer of information personalizes search results without making you change your searching behavior, and provides the endorsement of friends. And the great thing is, the more friends you have on StumbleUpon, the better the friend component of SearchReviews becomes. You can add people who you feel are experts in a particular category in order to view their endorsements on search results, or just see what sites your friends have discovered.

StumbleUpon has been making great strides toward being an essential part of one’s web browser. The community aspect of rating sites for others to find brings some good content, especially with their Stumble Video, to the attention of web surfers.