The first thing I do every day is check my emails. After that I login to my newsreader to check up on my favourite blogs (and blogs which commonly break news). The emails I receive and the blogs I check daily are the inspiration for quite a lot of my posts however I also use Twitter, check forums from time to time and use StumbleUpon occasionally too.

Going, Going Gone

I am not active in the StubleUpon community at all but I do love stumbling from time to time as it’s a great place to find great articles, particularly on smaller sites which I’m unlikely to find during my usual browsing routine. However, recently I have found that results seem to get less and less accurate the more you stumble.

For example, the other day I was stumbling using the keyword Blogging, a popular keyword and one which should bring up a lot of results. I came across a few good articles but after about 10 stumbles or so I noticed that results were getting more and more unrelated to blogging. I started coming across some joke sites, some political news and some funny image sites. The results also started to get older. All in all results were more and more unrelevant with each stumble.

If I was searching for a strange keyword or perhaps 2 or 3 keywords then I could understand why results would get worse as there would be less pages tagged with my search term. However, Blogging is an incredibly popular term and one which I’m sure many pages get tagged with so I’m confused why results are getting poorer after 10+ stumbles.

I’ve read a lot of posts on the internet about the StumbleUpon algorithm, most of which are speculation and involve a rating applied to the initial stumbler and the number of thumbs up and thumbs down. However, I haven’t see anyone else talk about the inaccuracy of results after a lot of stumbles.

Has anyone else noticed this? I’m curious to know if other stumblers have seen this too 🙂

Written by Kevin Muldoon of Blogging Tips – Follow Kevin on Twitter.

Originally posted on August 12, 2008 @ 6:28 pm