Review | Scour – The Social Search Engine
Search Engines: the most widely used application on the world wide web. Whether it is Google, Yahoo, Live, Lycos, DogPile, Etc… we use them and you might not even realise just how much you use them. Now, we are being introduced to the new and innovative Scour.com – The Social Search Engine.
Opening its doors to the public only one month ago (launched June, 2008) Scour has been grabbing some attention. There are three main areas that have really caught my interest and where else better to start really, than to share those with you?
1. The Social Search Engine
Users rate the results that are returned in their searches, similarly to something like Stumble with a ‘Thumbs Up’ (Relevant) or ‘Thumbs Down’ (Not Relevant) system. This means that the search results obtain a rank by participating users and the more relevant sites begin to obtain priority positions in future searches.
2. Results & Position
Scour returns up to 30 results in its searches: 10 x the three search engines, Google, Yahoo & Live. With each result returned on Scour, the position is displayed from the other search engines of where that result would be found. This I found to be quite accurate with the searches I had been testing with. You can then also arrange your results by each of the individual search engines ranking structure.
3. Revenue
Did I mention, you can make money from this!? There is a points system integrated in Scour, where users are rewarded for searching, ranking, commenting, etc… After reaching 6,500 points, users can redeem their earned points and pick up a Visa gift card with the amount entitled to them on it, starting at $25.
How Users Earn Points:
- +1 point for every search
- +2 point for rating a search result
- +3 points for commenting on a search result
- + 25% of the points earned from your friends – [Join with Zen Elements here]
- There IS a limit cap to prevent scammers of 500 points per day
User Interface
Scour’s design is light, clean and the returned results are displayed in an easy to read layout. With AJAX driving the site, operation is slick and speedy even with its slightly more graphical interface. When you click on one of your search results, the site loads still within a Scour envoirment (which you can close) so that you can vote/comment with ease.
The Future Of Scour… reading tea leaves
Scour is actually a later development from the previously named AfterVote (more can be read on that here). If AfterVote is anything to go by however, we might be seeing some great features popping up soon in Scours inventory such as custom search preferences, personal profiles, friend grouping and more.
Final Thoughts
Google is & always be my preferred search engine: ‘Tokyo Time’, ‘Dundee Weather’, ‘Define: CSS’, ’1000 * 5′, etc… I love it. However, I will continue to dabble with Scour and I am very interested to see how Scour develops as more and more users join the community and begin to participate.
It is fair to say that unless you are going to be religiously using Scour to search something crazy, you’re not going to make much money. Still, possible money making aside, it is hard to deny that Scour is a pretty nifty search engine.
End of the day, join up and see what you make of it. What do you have to lose?
[ZEN ELEMENTS INVITES YOU!]
Take care & enjoy your searching, where ever it may be!
Alex | Zen
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Cool review. I signed up earlier today,nice to see it was not a bad idea.
I checked out Scour and it seems kind of useless to have a comments section because many people write things that are completely off topic. For example, I searched Obama and instead of getting comments on how the page worked as a search results, people were having political conversations. This was not helpful. Me.dium recently released a search engine that works differently, in that you don’t have to vote or write comments.
Me.dium (http://me.dium.com/search) is processing user’s clickstream data in real-time to create a different lens based on what’s going on now. e.g. do a search for John Edwards on Google or Live, and you get johnedwards.com and wiki/johnedwards. Do the same search on Me.dium and you learn that today people care about his love child, pictures of his mistress, etc.
The difference is real-time (what people are browsing now) vs. historical (what they browsed in the past). Social vs. Old School. Check it out and let us know your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search.
they are freaking spammers – I already have 8 invites and they have no opt-out link in their stupid emails
I wish they kept their system where you can cash out after some time… as opposed the sweepstakes systems they implemented.