» Scour, social search with a twist

Scour, social search with a twist

Scour is a brand new meta social search engine that encourages voting and commentary on each of its query results drawn from Google, Yahoo! And Live Search. And they will pay you to use their site.

You score points for searching, voting and commenting and if you invite your friends, Scour will add 20% of your friends’ points to your balance.

From my point of view, the money is the least interesting part. For one thing, in Scour’s own scenario, an average of 4.5 searches per day translates into 25 US dollars a year. So unless you invite lots of friends, you won’t get rich using Scour.

I’m more interested to see if the social search concept of Scour is an improvement on standard web search. If it is, I’ll return even if they don’t pay me. So how does it work and is it any good?

How does it work?

Scour enables discovery through user feedback, friends and groups. When you enter a search query, Scour searches Yahoo, Live search and Google and the rank the results will reflect the recommendations of the users.

To help with the ranking, registered users can easily vote for their favorites by clicking the thumbs up icon — or the thumbs down icon for the search results they find inappropriate or poor.

Users can also improve Scour and add information to the search results by commenting on search result. You can further improve your search experience by connecting to users who have recommended sites you like, users who seem to have similar interests to you.

You can choose to view results from your favorite search engine, still with the whole social search system of Scour intact.

Is it any good?

Scour is easy to navigate and the search results are uncluttered even though there is quite a lot of information related to each search result: You get the title of the page along with a summary (from the description meta tag) and the URL. Then you are informed of the site’s ranking in Yahoo, Live search and Google and you have the option to vote and/or comment.

It is easy to vote and comment, but there is no button to click to save comments and no way to know whether your comment is saved or not. Half of the comments I entered seemed to disappear into cyberspace.

You can search for web sites, images and video. But only web search is enhanced by Scour’s social search model. I can’t think why. With the horrible signal to noise ratio on Youtube, I would love some recommendations from a social search engine like Scour.

A the moment, though, Scour is brand new and the comments are few and far between. If Scour achieves the critical mass of active users necessary for web communities to function, it might become a “valuable” resource (yes, there’s a pun here )