Social search is upon us: A new brand of search engines is taking shape right now. In July we covered Scour, a new social meta search engine that encourages voting and commentary on its query results. In order to give you a glimpse behind the scenes of a social search engine in the making, we have interviewed Scour CEO Dan Yomtobian.

Pandia: Why does Scour pay registered users for their comments and ratings?

Dan Yomtobian: For Scour to function as a social community, it is important to reach a critical mass of contributions. We hope that the reward system fosters community-building.

Given the current economic climate, personal finances are becoming a concern for many individuals. We think there is an interest in makeing a little easy money by simply doing something you always do anyway.

Pandia: Seeing as you reward comments, isn’t there a risk that people will leave virtually useless comments just to score points? This strikes me as a double edged sword: To encourage rating and comments you reward this activity, but the value of the ratings and comments might be degraded by people rating and commenting not out of interest but because of your incentives.

Dan Yomtobian: Comment functionality was envisioned as a way to promote community building on Scour. However, we realize that not all comments will be beneficial to users, which is why we have set strict rules to help ensure quality over quantity.

In addition to our rules, we also have a very rigorous editorial process which will filter out remaining “spammy” comments and provide a better search experience for the user. Users with deleted comments will also forfeight those points.

Pandia: In the comments the signal to noise ratio could have been better. What kind of benefits do you see your users get from the search engine result page (SERP) comments?

Dan Yomtobian: SERP comments allow for its users to state their opinion or share their expertise on a wide range of categories while viewers can learn and receive real human feedback. It is easy for search engines to loose that human connection.

Our comment system allows for peer to peer interaction and offers people a chance to voice their opinion and alter results to what they feel is relevant per keyword. Coming soon, users will be able to connect with one another through each others comments.

Pandia: For each search result, it is possible to click an icon to take your search to Google, Yahoo or Live. This will probably serve to make your users aware of the fact that you are a meta search engine. It will also cost you some traffic. What is the main purpose of this feature?

Dan Yomtobian: It is true that we are a meta search engine, we don’t want to hide that from the public. Our goal is to enhance the user’s search experience through a network of user contributions including an intuitive interface. If users would like to go to other search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN then we want to make sure they can get to where they want in a timely and enjoyable manner.

Pandia: Google is experimenting with user voting. How does their experiment compare to Scour?

Dan Yomtobian: We don’t know much about Google’s experiment with voting. However, if Google does go forward with voting capabilities it will only be for their results set, limiting user feedback for results found on the other engines. Scour allows users to search and vote across all 3 engines allowing for a greater breadth of feedback.

Scour demo
Pandia’s review of Scour

Other Pandia articles social search:
Introduction to social search
How to make use of social media in search engine marketing
50 Matches review
Introduction to Mahalo
Wikia Search review
Nsyght review
ChaCha review