Semil writes explains our name:

The name PandaWhale partly derives from the theory that there are whales and pandas on the web, where a few whales who have big ideas and big audiences create and organize content, and where many pandas sit peacefully and consume that content, much like a panda would graze on bamboo.

In startup-speak, the pandas are the unique visitors who somehow end up on a site like PandaWhale, and the whales are the rabid collectors who stash content and interact with others through a variety of online personas, some real and some through pseudonyms.

While it’s important to have many whales stashing, it’s really about the quality of each new page, as well as how much each whale creates.

The juice behind PandaWhale’s recent growth is that this small group of whales subtly conducts important work for Google by bringing content (including images) from regions of the web where Google’s crawlers cannot easily explore. These whales stash images from Bing or GIFs from Tumblr and other types of media appended with social data that Google can’t quite rank, and then, as each stash is an open web page, it becomes visible to the search giant. In the same way Pinterest toiled for years before their growth spurt of 2011, PandaWhale could be on a similar path. Who knows?

There are many places to share and communicate around images and links, such as Reddit, and many of those sites have dense networks around them. Perhaps that’s why PandaWhale isn’t over-designed visually, but carefully designed and architected in such a way such that it’s searchable, organized by topic, and encourages new images and links in every stash. 

He's right that we're more concerned with speed and searchability than visual design.

It is a great article -- I enjoyed reading it! -- and I'd appreciate anyone who wants to tweet it, too:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/30/pandawhales-slow-march-to-relevance/

Adam, that's great achievement. Congratulations!

Thank you Sergey -- we were pleasantly surprised by the response!

I love PandaWhale.  I love it a lot; however there is one minor design change that I would make.  Currently you use a recursive (wrong term?) page list, what is on page 5 today will be on page 400 in about 6 months.  I believe, for ease of reference it should be a certain page and stay that way.As you do when you write in a journal, newer entries get the higher page numbers and the older ones have the smaller page numbers as you progress through the book and you don't write on page one then put a new page in and make page one page 2If you reverse the page listing mechanism, then what was the first post will always be on page 1, page 2 will always be page 2.  I may be explaining this poorly, but I haven't had my afternoon tea yet and it's that time.  I hope that you take this into consideration, Adam.  You're great and I love the community here.

Thank you Nathaniel. I think I understand what you're saying. Will think about how to make it so.

In the meantime you can save the pages you want to see again by putting them in your own stashes.

i'll have to do that, my folder on my desktop is massive with all the pandawhale pages I like.

Heh. If you don't feel like making stashes you can also just hit the SAVE button, which puts it into a single Saved stash.