Serendipitous Searching

I've recently rediscovered the joy of serendipity.  StumbleUpon is a great tool for a couple of things.  When you are sitting at lunch and need a brain break, but don't want to go to the old sources, you hit the Stumble button. SU brings you to a site based on your preferences. You say if you like the site. If so, you'll get more sites that are similar to your interests.  SU helps you experience randomness and relevance at the same time!  As opposed to these issues with objectivity in a normal search:

1. The search engine has an agenda.  It might be to provide relevance, or sort by usefulness, or appear unbiased. Whatever. These things don't happen by accident. 

2. The providers of content legitimately want you to see their stuff.  So, they spend a lot of time, effort and money on making their stuff show up first

3. Lots of people want to make money on this without providing any real value. So, they spend lots of time, effort and money trying to trick the engine into showing you their junk.

That stumble feature was *pretty* cool. But the issues above make it *really* cool.  I've got it installed in my browser and now I can see when I do a google search if the site has been rated well by other Stumblers.  Check out this picture of a google search for the word "awesome."  Look at the little gold stars from SU that show me which links might be more interesting then others.  No longer am I chained to the first result!

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