What are Search Engines?

Search Engines are algorithm based systems which mine/dig information based on certain pre-determined factors and suggest the most relevant pages to the users. Popular examples of search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

What are Social Bookmarking Sites?

Social Bookmarking Sites are websites which allow users to share their most liked pages and sites for other site users to discover. They rely more on the community than on computer programs for data-mining. Some popular examples are StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Twitter and Facebook.

In this post we shall discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both types of sites and where the future of the internet lies.

Which is Better?

1. Authenticity of Suggestions: As most bloggers and webmasters already know, search engines despite their huge popularity are subject to manipulation through Black Hat SEO. Similarly, you can spend say $10 to get a few hundred bookmarks for your page/site. Clearly, neither of them is foolproof as far as genuineness of suggested links is concerned. However, if you limit your social networks to trusted and well-known individuals, they are most likely to suggest relevant and authentic sites.
2. User Base/Popularity: While Search Engines usually rely on the Click Through Rates of their results to determine the usefulness of their search results pages and thus the search algorithm, social bookmarking sites rely on the sheer number of users and shared items to determine their popularity. Definitely Google is the most popular website on the internet, but isn’t Facebook, with a userbase of over 750 million, catching up fast? Search Engines focus on technical data while social bookmarking sites are based on popular choices.
3. Index Volume of Suggested pages/sites: Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo index billions of webpages and then rank them using various technical factors, while the index of links shared on social bookmarking sites solely depends on discovery of new sites and pages by the users, which they then share with others. While the total number of links may be far less on social bookmarking sites, they are mostly useful. New pages have as much of a chance of becoming popular on bookmarking sites as old pages, and thus usefulness of the information/service provided is given more credence as opposed to SEO required for search engines.
4. Time/Temporal Relevance of Information:Search Engines often provide tools like Sorting by time, relevance in terms of context etc. but new websites and blogs which do not lay much emphasis on SEO are likely to remain unnoticed by search engine users. In contrast, a site launched the day before can go viral in 24 hours if an influential person really likes the content and shares it with friends/followers.
5. Volatility of Suggestions: As changes are implemented in search engine algorithms, like the Google Panda update, search engine result rankings are drastically changed. So, if you keep searching for information about a particular topic, and unable to find a particular page you found really useful earlier, you might never get what you want. On the other hand, social bookmarking sites allow you to “Bookmark” the sites/pages you like for future reference. Of course, you would be able to discover more and possibly better pages quickly using search engines.

Combination of both (Search Engines and Social Bookmarking Sites)?

In recent years, social bookmarking sites have developed advanced search engines, while search engines have developed systems for incorporating popular opinion about sites. Google has introduced “+1″, while Facebook has joined hands with Bing. Twitter, Delicious and other bookmarking sites have pretty cool search engines too!
Clearly, extremes are no longer as popular as hybrids.

Does the future lie in a single search engine which combines the best of all data-mining technologies or multiple services which offer a variety of results for a variety of users?

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StumbleUpon is growing in popularity due to the “channel changing” nature of web surfers. They don’t want to have to click on a website or go to a website to read articles, they just want to click a button and stumble on a page in the topic or area of interest and be shown something cool.

This is why StumbleUpon is actually getting a boost from Facebook and from mobile browsers where it literally is like the web equivalent of channel surfing.

But, did you know that you can also use StumbleUpon to help you come up with Blog Post idea’s?  When I myself am in a rut for what to blog about or share with my readers I will just pop open my StumbleUpon toolbar and pick a category related to Tech or gaming and just bounce around until I find something cool to read and talk about.  I also stumble upon sites that I almost always like or thumb up myself.

StumbleUpon allows you to also share your links with your network of stumblers to help “prod” them into checking out your article.  Since StumbleUpon limits you to following no more than 500 people it kind of prevents your social network from getting too out of hand, but this is also a limiting factor as you can invite Facebook and Twitter friends whose profiles match and I quickly maxed out my following by doing this.

The next time you are looking for a blog post idea, try stumbling for one and probably will come up with something to write about (or at least share on your social networking sites).

As always, you can follow DragonBlogger on StumbleUpon and feel free to share some interesting stuff with me.

-Justin Germino

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With Find Friends StumbleUpon will connect to your Facebook or Twitter profile and find everyone with a matching profile in SU for you, it will automatically allow you to follow them.  With this I followed about 400 people (note there is a limit on how many followers per day, so I broke it out to about 200 on one day and 200 on the next day) I think the limit is reduced when using the find friends, I know when I try to follow people manually the limit is much lower per day but it seems to let you follow a much larger batch at once when you find friends in this manner.

So StumbleUpon emails people by default when they are "followed" and I started getting dozens of follows back in return, this lead to several messages being left from fellow bloggers I know (and in some cases don’t) but we just never connected on StumbleUpon before for some reason.  But there is a limit of 500 friends that you can follow on StumbleUpon so I realized that I reached that limit without catching everybody in my Twitter/Facebook networks.  What this means is I am going to have to weed through who I am following to actually follow people who stumble articles more to my preference but I don’t have the time to do cleanup right now.

When using StumbleUpon you have to know that you cannot just use the system to promote your own articles, you must take some time to stumble and vote up some other articles that you like.  If you only stumble your own stuff you are going to be considered a spammer and nobody else is likely to stumble your work except friends.  This is where the SU toolbar comes into play, it allows you to set categories and then randomly bounce pages in that category, or you can just simply stumble any page you are on that you like.  This is a great way to show support for a blogger and a stumble is actually worth potentially far more traffic to an article you enjoy than a Digg, Vote or Tweet in many cases.  That same stumble might bring that person 100+ visits from a single stumble, I have seen bloggers have site outages within a few minutes of a stumble when a friend thumbs up’d their article.

Though SU traffic is a little bouncy, I have noticed that SU traffic tends to not leave as much traffic and tends to increase your bounce rate, but SU traffic also tends to have a higher % chance of clicking on AdSense so could drive some slightly higher AdSense earnings when your stumbles climb.

Overall, the network shouldn’t be relied or counted on for traffic, but should not be ignored either.  You want to diversify your traffic and using StumbleUpon and occasionally sharing your links on social media with Su.Pr can help expose your site to more traffic.  Don’t hesitate to ask your friends or followers to stumble an article once in a while, just make sure you return the favor when they ask.  Hell, make sure you stumble other articles you enjoyed even if they didn’t ask or don’t have a StumbleUpon button on their post.

You can see here are some of my last 4 articles I "Voted or Thumbed Up" on StumbleUpon:

One was one of my own poems, and that poem had a skyrocket amount of views (not as much as SU says because some of the views I think are bots or crawls) but still it was pretty high.  I only Stumble about 1 out of 5-6 articles as my own, most of the time I stumble other sites.  In fact I stumble more articles on my poetry blog than on DragonBlogger.com.

Still, would love to see StumbleUpon drive traffic to my site like this Stumble:

How many of my fellow bloggers are using StumbleUpon?  What kind of traffic to you see with it?  Connect with me DragonBlogger on StumbleUpon and I would be happy to check out your stumbled articles.

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

I ran a test on my poetry blog and heavily promoted a poem on Su.Pr and Twitter, I was shocked and thrilled to see by the end of day 1 I had the following stats on a single poem:

Yet, when Google Analytics came around it showed a measly 35 visits to the poem were recorded, 35 visits when StumbleUpon showed 389, the poem had 15 Retweets, and 3 votes from BlogEngage.  How can this be, where is the inaccuracy?

Well, in doing research I found many forums suggesting that links submitted via Su.Pr will report bot clicks and views which Google Analytics weeds out.  This may be true and in further testing I noticed that upon creating and submitting a Su.Pr link within 30 seconds of sending it out on Twitter, I saw 100+ pageviews show up in the StumbleUpon badge.  I know that my poetry blog or Twitter profile is not that popular that it could get 100 pageviews within 10 seconds of sending out a Tweet so only bots can account for this pageview inflation.

From my own experience Google Analytics is the most trustworthy for weeding out useless clicks/visits that don’t amount to anything more than a crawler or bot trying to index your link.  Everything else is inaccurate and should be taken with a grain of salt (note the BlogEngage badge shows how many votes not pageviews).

Still, I have a guest article on ComLuv Blog that shows an even bigger example of analytics disparity between Compete.com, Alexa and Google Analytics and I worked with a client who provided me with access to dig deeper into how and why the anomaly exists.

This article talks about accurate ways to measure site analytics and why you can only trust sites where you actually have tracking code installed.

-Dragon Blogger

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In addition when the user visits the su.pr link of your site, they can see how many comments, and share the article on facebook or twitter. These are some of the reasons to use su.pr, when people stumble your articles you can get surges of traffic, and by using su.pr to compress your URL and sharing it over your networks, you make it easier for people to stumble articles even if they don’t have a stumbleupon toolbar installed on their browser.

-Dragon Blogger

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