• Mashable, Wednesday, August 17, 2011 3:13 PM

Refining its recommendations, social discovery service StumbleUpon is now letting users find pages related to hundreds of thousands specific topics rather than 500 set categories. Regarding the new "Explore Box," Mashable writes: "It's as though a search engine and a 'best of' list had a child."

If StumbleUpon hasn't sorted the exact term users are looking for, it will match them with what it considers the next best thing. At launch, the feature is limited to a small search bar in the browser product. "But despite the minimal presence on the homepage, it's a huge change for StumbleUpon," Mashable assures. In the future, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp says, StumbleUpon will integrate Explore Box's technology with its follow feature so that users can Stumble a mix of general and specific topics.

"We've had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine," Camp says. Adds Mashable: "That will make the discovery engine a lot more personalized, and eventually ... enable StumbleUpon's advertisers to more closely target their ads."

Read the whole story at Mashable »