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I came across an interesting find today while attempting to understand how the Stumble button works. How many of you stumble your friend’s articles? I do it all the time, and always wondered how the results were driven. I did not crack the code, but I have noticed something that makes the returned pages traceable.

When you push the stumble button a random mutual friend, or someone you are a fan of, is selected. A submission they have thumbed is returned. The submission that is returned must be categorized within one of your interests on your preferences page. Secondly the returned result always remains on the first page of that tag.

Here is an example of a scenario

You have the toolbar set to stumble your friends
You push the Stumble Button and a random friend is selected
Then a random page is selected that was submitted within one of your interests
If you have internet as an interest, then a page from your friends internet tag will be returned
One of the latest 10 thumbed up articles is return to you for viewing.

This is very hard to explain in writing, so I decided to do a desktop screen capture of the process. I am new to editing video and using the screen capture software that I have, so it may not be the best or greatest quality, but it should be able to visually show you how this process works.

In this process there are only two things I really don’t understand.

Friend Selection – How is the random friend selected? I have not been able to define this reasoning, but my guess is that the stumbler who submits frequently and/or who has a lot of stumbleupon authority gets his thumbed pages displayed more often. While testing this, I have seen many different articles being returned from the same stumbler. This tells me that some stumblers have more authority within a specific category or tag then others.

Article Selection – While it is obvious that the page returned will always be within the 1st 10 results of the submitted tag, I have not been able to determine which of the 10 or why one over the other. I think it’s just random, or even possibly weighted against others who have thumbed the article.

What Does This Mean?

It basically means that your articles, or the articles you thumb up, have a higher chance of exposure if they remain within the last 10 thumbed articles within a specific tag. If you thumb up 10 articles today within the weblogs category, then every time you are selected as the random stumbler, one of the last ten articles will be selected.

It also shows how important it is to submit an article to the correct category. If more stumblers have internet selected as an interest in their profile, then you want to submit more articles to the internet category than the weblog category. You can be limiting the amount of exposure with an improper submission, because you are limiting the exposure based on stumblers interests.

Stumbling ALL

I have also tested this method with “ALL” selected on the stumble bar. It seems to work exactly the same, however I think it’s the first 20 results instead of just the first 10. There is also one other variance. If you try this out, you will get one of two types of returns. One that is traceable as defined above, and the other return result will be a historic stumble ranging from 2004 – 2006. I cannot find a similarity in the historic returns, so I assume they are random and just returned as “all time favorites” from within their assigned tag.

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