Just about two years after eBay purchased the StumbleUpon union site, the original owners have bought back the company making it independent again.
The eBay company bought the site two years ago for 75 million dollars, but they sold it back to its original founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, along with a group of investors: Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital.
The StumbleUpon site which has been founded in 2001 was designed to send its users to websites based on recommendations by other users. The recommendations are available on the web and through a free toolbar. eBay bought the company in 2007 but, like Skype, StumbleUpon hasn’t been considerably integrated into eBay’s services although it grew from 2.3 million to about 7.4 million members, and from about 150 million recommendations per month to about 425 million.
In that time, the number of advertisers raised from a few hundred to about 20.000 advertisers.
Twitter is a mini blogging service web site where millions of people post short text messages. The company emerged as the keeper of a valuable online index of real time facts, comments, and announcements, information that is very valuable for the Google search engine index.
There are rumors of close negotiations between Google and Twitter and we’ll probably see in the near future if the two companies end up in a formal partnership or collaboration.
Twitter is for sure a cool thing for Google to buy. The importance of real time search and the capability to capture this stream of twitter discussions is an important step in social media and search because users are trying to mine data for information that might otherwise be sought in a search engine.
Twitter can also be a good place for Google to sell ad space. However, Twitter is not a threat to Google in the on-line search market.
Checking the Page Rank history of a site can be very useful since it can give you hints about the age of the site and the most important, it can show if the site was penalized by Google at some point. Generally if PR was higher than 0, and then dropped to 0, it’s very likely site was penalized. Another case is if PR drops 2 units or more. The best tool to check for PR history is URL Trends. Simply enter the URL in the search box, then push Site Rankings.
