StumbleUpon gets into Google (and Wikipedia and Yahoo and Flickr...)

StumbleUpon, a fun Web discovery service, is getting a new feature, SearchReviews, that will take it beyond its historic role of hyperefficient time-waster.SearchReviews pushes StumbleUpon ratings and other information into the search results pages on major search engines and content sites like Wikipedia, Google Reader, Flickr, and YouTube.

Users who run the StumbleUpon toolbar will now see little icons after search results on these sites that show them how popular a site is in the StumbleUpon community, the number of thumbs-up ratings it has, and who of their friends has rated the page.
It changes the way you look at search results pages. Now, instead of just looking at a sea of links in descending order based on what your search site thinks is most important, you also do a quick visual scan of the results for little StumbleUpon icons that indicate that actual humans have marked the page as worthwhile. If you happen across a site that a friend has flagged, you'll have an even better indication that the site is something that you'll want to check out.

This new feature makes the StumbleUpon social network much more valuable, so StumbleUpon is also making it easier to add friends from your other networks to it: You can import your friend lists from popular online e-mail services, as well as from Facebook. The service is also getting an Outlook contacts importer as part of this update.