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Luis Pereira over at Stumpedia asked me to do a paid review to follow up my original post about Stumpedia. By the looks of it, he has added a lot of changes, but for those who have not already experimented with this people powered search engine, I will start with the introduction about the site.
Stumpedia is an interesting twist on conventional search engines - it relies on user participation and submission to provide search results rather than sending out spiders to crawl websites. The site is one hundred percent powered by the people that use it.
Stumpedia works by letting registered users submit links to specific search queries. When you perform a search, the page that subsequently appears gives you a simple, instantaneous way to add a link and description. These links are then reviewed by other users and can be given a positive or negative rating. Their ranking in search results is determined by this system of peer grading. While this submission process is great for interaction and can potentially provide more user-friendly results, it has potential for abuse and is wholly dependent on the community for quality control and content - much like Wikipedia. It’s a hit-or-miss system.
Since it’s still a fairly new service, Stumpedia only has 450 users and 2,800 links. There is practically no competition for keywords (there are seven results for “blogging,” for example) so if you submit your website to relevant keywords you are almost guaranteed to remain on the first page of the term for a while. A few minutes of registration and submission can have beneficial effects on traffic in the long run.
In addition to getting new viewers, Stumpedia’s links are “dofollow” and thus have SEO benefits. You can get dozens of backlinks to your site easily.
Overall, this new service is an interesting foray into a new kind of search engine. While it’s not close to dethroning Google anytime soon, it has its individual merits. The interactive search results, traffic potential, and backlinks are solid reasons to check Stumpedia out.
To benefit the early users, the site offers the ability to see the top activity in the last week, month, and year. As of the time of this writing, my blog is currently the 7th most popular link on the site. If you decide to check out the site, consider giving my blog a thumbs up.
All in all, the site is incredibly simple without a layout and the logo isn’t too amazing. Upon first impression, I thought to myself, what the heck is with the yellow guy in the logo? It doesn’t really make the logo look any better, and definitely doesn’t add anything to the site. The site really just boasts about the service, rather than the user interface. I am not a big fan of the name, as it is an obvious combination of “stumbleupon” and “wikipedia” and branding wise, it gets confusing when you are hearing it for the first time. When I first saw it, I immediately read it as Stumbleupon because that has been branded in my head for a long time.
In Stumpedia’s current state, it is EXTREMELY susceptible to spam. Unlike going the wikipedia route of removing bad content, the only choice the user has is to give the site a thumbs down. However, my blog has 8 thumbs up and 1 thumbs down, and is ranking above a site that has 8 thumbs up. This tells me that the thumbs down feature is completely useless, because I would rather have a thumbs down than someone not voting at all.
Another spam problem occurs when a user submits his own site to hundreds of different keywords. An example I see that occurred today is:
firefighter linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
fire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
Structure fire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
Search and rescue linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
Firefighting linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
California news linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 57 minutes, 3 hours ago
wildfires linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 57 minutes, 3 hours ago
wildfire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 58 minutes, 3 hours ago
wildland fire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 58 minutes, 3 hours ago
As far as I can tell, a search for “fire” shouldn’t bring up that website.
In conclusion, I can honestly say that I don’t see anyone ever using this service in it’s present form. The only beneficial use for it in my opinion, is that you can hook a few new visitors and build a few new links. Unless a more professional system is put into place to actually bring up better use results, this website will never be more than a spam haven.
Well, assuming that over 90% of my readers own websites, go ahead and submit your own link to rank for whatever term you want!
Interesting concept. Still feels like it needs some work though. Maybe released a bit too early?
Keep up the development, would like to check it out in the coming months.
Thanks for the info. I agree that there are some sites that are not so good.
Nice article, thanks for sharing Stumpedia.
I agree, I thought this was an interesting idea when I saw it a couple months ago. But it leaves a lot of room for spammers.
Maybe they can make it de-index links having mooo….re thumbs down than thumbs up
Looks interesting, but it could be abused by spammers. I’m going to submit to them though. :]
Its a good concept but it might need more work, let see what happens.
It doesn’t look like much but it’s an interesting idea, I look forward to seeing if it works or not. I’m going to give it a try because I don’t think it can hurt and I’d like to get in early in case it does work.
Submitted my blog for a few keywords and even managed to get a little bit of traffic. Great search engine!
About spammers: single spammer who visited site once and added his link is OK… Let him live!
Spammer who access network to submit hundereds backlinks could be busted really fast. Single complaint from honest user will be enough to delete spam profile and all links which was submitted.
Thanks for the info Collin! I’m off to get a link now.
I’ve checked it out a couple of times, and I keep waiting for it to take off. I think Stumpedia has a lot of potential once it gets more users.
I suppose it’s good to get in these things early, but I doubt it’ll have any real value in links. Things like this are bound to be infested by spammers and until Stumpedia can get a REAL spam protection service, well, it’ll just be a toy.