Stumbleupon is a great tool and if you have been following Realgeek regularly then you must have known that I am a big fan of Stumbleupon. I love it for many reasons and breaking my hatred towards toolbars is mere one. I have said it before and I want to reiterate that Stumbleupon is the best WEb 2.0 tool out there and its efects are rather very dramatic. A budding blogger should leverage social media to promote his blog while stumbleupon should be the top application he must employ.

Following is the excerpt from VentureBeat where Garrett Camp, Chief Architect of Stumbleupon discloses how it works.

There are three key parts to the Recommendation Engine. There are pages from the topics you marked that interest you, socially endorsed pages and peer endorsed pages. Socially endorsed pages are the ones that users you have befriended on the site like, while peer endorsed pages are ones from users who have similar voting habits (giving a site the thumbs up or thumbs down) as you.

These three factors are why it’s important to not only choose categories you like, but to choose friends with similar interests and to only vote up sites you really enjoy in order to get the best experience out of StumbleUpon.

When a site is first stumbled, it is put through both the Classification Engine and the Clustering Engine as shown above. The Classification Engine filters the page by topic and tags. Sometimes a user does this work, but sometimes it’s submitted without any of this information, so the engine has to determine where to put the content. This is a big job when you have over 30,000 pages each day being submitted, as StumbleUpon has.

The Clustering Engine sorts out the votes a site is getting so it can determine which sites are the quality ones that should be served. Again, this sounds simple enough until you realize that StumbleUpon has 5.6 million users. This engine is a key cog in what serves up over 10 million stumbles that take place every day.

You can read full blog post at VentureBeat.

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