A news story from The Boston Globe reports on the new development announced by StumbleUpon, the web search and user recommendation website that was acquired by eBay in May this year. The company is launching a new service called SearchReviews, whereby a searcher can see what their friends have found useful or interesting on the web.

With 3.7 million users signed up the StumbleUpon service (mostly via a downloadable toolbar) , there is currently a simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" rating given to websites and videos. The new SearchReviews feature will now display small coloured icons against those links that friends have rated, appearing on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL or Ask. They also will appear on Google News, Yahoo News, Flickr photos, the Wikipedia online encyclopedia and YouTube videos.

StumbleUpon say that this will help to add a new level of selection within search results, with popular or useful sites standing out in the results. Since it was founded in Canada 6 years ago, StumbleUpon users have rated some 13 million sites, although the hope is that this new service will become more popular and achieve a critical mass that could change what constitutes popularity on the web and how it is measured - the ultimate combination of search combined with user reviews.