A colleague I work with sent me an interesting link today. As part of a course she must learn the latest and greatest ways to search the web for content. She found out that 80% of the web is not located through traditional search engines.
Wow....do you know what that means is out there?
Well if it's true, I just googled (I love that's a verb now) the word "the" and got 5,130,000,000 hits. If that is only 20% of what is out there then there are potentially 25,650,000,000 sites that are really in cyberspace. Okay maybe not exactly, but I'm sure the premise is real. Not everyone knows how to set their site up properly to be found by search engines, so it makes sense that many are hiding.
The site my friend referred me to is called Stumble Upon.
When you set up your account you are given the option of choosing which types of sites you would like to see from about 500 different topics. Some examples of categories are alcoholic drinks, internet tools, astronomy, crafts, physics, iraq, online games, open source, and web development.
A toolbar is installed in your browser that when you click it you are sent to a webpage based on one of the topics you have chosen. The pages are ranked by users (3,727,921) and are delivered to you based on the preferences you have chosen.
It's a neat little tool if you are looking around for some different content you've never seen before, if you love to just websurf, and/or you just want to learn what's out there.
Obviously it isn't too new if there are 3.5 million+ users. However, content on the web is always expanding and changing and it's seems like a good way to see what's out there and have your say on ranking a few of the sites.
Not only can you "stumble" through websites but also photos, news articles, videos, and a specific topic. I could lose a lot of time playing with this one.
Some neat ones I stumbled onto (for now....):
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