Scour is a new social search engine that searches 3 popular engines at once and allows users to vote and comment on the results. According to Scour, their purpose is "to bridge the gap between searchers and relevant results. By providing a platform for the user to vote and comment on relevancy, searchers connect with one another creating a true social search community, attained through innovative solutions to meet the needs of today's web searchers." Scour draws results from Google, Yahoo! and Live Search by searching all 3 and ranking the results dependent on the recommendations of its users. Users can also customise the results via filtering by search engine, so you can decide whether you want to see the combined results, or if you want to specify Google only results, or Google and Yahoo!, or Yahoo! and Live Search etc.
Scour also displays the ranking of each listing on the 3 search engines within the results page, so for example you could see that the top listing on Scour for your search term comes in at number 1 on Google and Yahoo! and number 2 on Live Search. Another feature of Scour is the ability to filter your search to include only images or videos - however web search is currently the only option which is enhanced by the social search model.
The social search angle of Scour comes in the form of user votes and comments on search results. Depending on the number of votes that a result receives it will move higher or lower in the rankings. So if you think a result is relevant to your search query you can give it a 'thumbs up', and if you think it's irrelevant you can give it a 'thumbs down'. The comments feature allows users to leave useful notes and information about the sites appearing in the results. So for example, if you carried out a search and a site you have used in the past appeared in the results listings you could write a comment saying something like 'great site and speedy delivery'. This could potentially help searchers reduce the amount of time they spend trawling through sites trying to find what they are looking for. You can also connect with other users based on searches of interest, which adds to the social element of the site.
Another feature of Scour is the rewards system. Users collect points for searching, commenting, voting and inviting friends to the site. Scour gives 1 point for a search, 2 for a vote, and 3 for a comment, with a maximum of 4 points per search. Users also get 25% of their friends' points if they introduce them to the site. Scour points can then be cashed in for Visa gift cards, with 6,500 points amounting to $25.
The site currently has around 6,000 active users and hopes to get 1% of the search market share (i.e. 2.5 million users) by the end of the year. However, whether or not Scour will be able to tempt enough users away from their favourite search engine to meet this target is something we'll be scouring the web to discover.
