eBay Buys StumbleUpon, Google Launches Competitor on Same Day
April 19, 2007 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
Wow, that was fast. On the same day eBay buys StumbleUpon for $40 million, Google launches a competitive service for the Google Toolbar. The latter now includes a dice icon that takes you to sites you might find interesting based on your previous search queries. Google was also bidding for StumbleUpon, but having a competitive service in the oven — one that relies on searchbots instead of humans, in line with Google’s strength — probably kept them from bidding too high.
eBay, on the other hand, has been more directly human-powered from day one. Same with their other recent acquisition, Skype. Perhaps the human-powered haphazardness of StumbleUpon does suit them more.
I’m an big fan of StumbleUpon, it’s a sad news for me Google didn’t go through with it. And being one of those who get something out from Google :p I will use our own service of course. ;)
I like Google’s, based on previous searches, really sad the SU features won’t be there.