StumbleUpon’s Explore Box Adds Context to Topics
StumbleUpon, a discovery engine that recommends personalized web and mobile content, has released a new beta feature, Explore Box, that allows users to discover web pages, videos, photos and more across hundreds of thousands of interests.
With the Explore Box, users can “stumble” through a stream of recommended content related to specific keywords or phrases. Since its launch, users have been asking for a way to use StumbleUpon to find content on more specific things and to expand the service. StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp explains the reason for the new Explore Box,
“We’ve had a prototype of this for a while, but earlier on we felt like we weren’t getting enough results. We couldn’t really do it at the beginning because we needed a bigger index. In the earlier days, if you had typed in a specific term, you may have gotten just five results. Now, we have millions of pages of content, and it will just get better over time.”
There’s high hopes for the future of StumbleUpon as they aim to integrate the follow feature and the Explore Box technology so that users can explore as array of general and specific topics, focusing in making searches more personalized and hopefully, in the near future, enable advertisers to bring their ads closer to specific targets.
It’s an evolving momentum for StumbleUpon as the company rethinks what social bookmarking and personal recommendations mean for today’s audience. Explore Box is a natural extension of what remains the core mechanic of StumbleUpon, incorporating even more personalization into each “stumble.” As web content requires more curation and even more contextualization, StumbleUpon is scouring through a great deal of data to enable a feature of this stature. We’re sure to see even more developments from the company as it leverages its use of data and user activity to monetize its advertising efforts.
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