It’s Elevator Pitch Friday Saturday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from Scour.com, a meta social search engine.
Scour searches and displays results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search all at once and enables each of its members to vote each listing up or down based on its relevance to their keyword as well as comment on their experiences with the site. In addition to the combined results Scour offers a kind of get-paid-to-search scheme based on points in a way similar to Microsoft SearchPerks. Users earn a point for each search, vote or comment they make and can claim a $25 Visa card when they’ve reached 6,500 points.
Founded in 2007, Scour was originally named Aftervote.com. Almost exactly 1 year later, Aftervote was acquired by Internext media, owner and operator of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded to Scour.com.
so you want me to rate a search result? wouldnt that require me to go to the webpage, review the content, then hit the back button, then add in a review? and i do this 6,500 times to earn $25?
what a waste of time
We have been using Scour for some time and we must admit, it is intriguing.
There is only one minor flaw – it would be nice to get the PageRank of each site that comes up on the SERPs.
But all and all, it provides interesting results for power searchers
Well, this has got to be the MOST brilliant search and browse interface I’ve seen in a very long time. Google is functional, but Scour seemed friendly(AND functional). I loved how I could delve deeper into each search result with a single click.
There seems to be a lot more in there but I think I’m going to have enough time to play with it now on…this is a super service.
I’m not sure how I feel about the 6,500/$25 situation, but whatever…
“Evertying you do on the internet begins with a web search”.
Fail. I stopped listening from this point onwards.
Hmmm, I take that back. After playing around the website I actually think the UI is pretty cool and the idea is pretty novel. I’m finding it damn slow though, anyone else?
It is truly amazing how many Social Media websites have been created; is this market getting saturated?
Jesse W.
http://www.subprimeblogger.com
I’m lazy. When I search i want the results fast. And once I find the stuff I’ve been looking for I just go to that site and don’t bother “voting each listing up or down” nor “commenting on my experience”. What good is that for? Do you think anyone cares about my experience? They just want to get the stuff they’re looking for. And regardless whether I had a “good experience”, what ultimately is going to bring those people back is going to depend on THEIR experience with the site, not mine nor anyone else’s.
I’m with looser. Why exactly am I voting? Trying to pay people to do it is a bad idea. SEOs will figure out a way to game the system so the voting will lose relevance quickly. However, I do like the fact that scour gives me the rank of a result on all three major search engines. I just don’t think that is a big enough hook or competitive advantage to give this company traction. Meta search engines are an old concept. They need more.
Hi, I am new here. Though this seems a nice experiment, but I am looking for a search engine which relies on existing diggs and delicious bookmarks. basically, something which combines pagerank and postrank. Is such a service already existing??
domain name is great cuil should buy it from them
Anyone remember the original Scour? I think it was Scour.net and was a great music pirating service.
definitely. and ratio ftp sites
Totally. As soon as I read the headline I wondered if anyone had commented on that yet…
Its URL.com with a few extra features nobody will use.
the search results are really cool. but I do not like the fact that if I want do a video search I have to sign up. Free or not that will be a feature that will turn 90% of their potential customers away.
I wonder how much money they spent to develop this product and service?
hmm…i didnt notice that you’d have to sign up for video search.
and you’re right, that wouldn’t be cool, at all.
scour people..are you listening in?
Ya it’s cool {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/aBBkepfiiz_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Ya it’s cool ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/nswsemQGw3″}}}
This guy is retarded. That is all.
21.66666667 days? Really? Wow!
Search 2.0 ?
Why the limitation on search pages ? Scour only returns two pages of search results. Also isn’t against the search API’s to re-rank the results ? Anyone ?
Interesting. What a fantastic user interface. It’s rather pretty and well thought out. Well done.
If these guys built more onto this, such as have pagerank / rank in all engines, votes, etc. dictate the result set, it would really become something useful.
As someone else mentioned though – the user cast voting could be abused. I wonder how they will tackle this.
I didn’t have to sign up for a video search… however, the results aren’t so great.
I got a sign in form instead of search results for videos
The best advice I’ve heard this week was by someone who told me that the best choice I could make in life was to find a large ascending innovation wave, and follow it as a career path. Reviewing all these new websites, cements my belief that the innovation wave for web technology is in severe deline.
Seriously, this site is not innovative. It basically uses the search engines’ api, some ajax, and fancy css to return the same results as the major search engines. This isn’t innovation, but decoration. It doesn’t even a search algorithm.
“It basically uses the search engines’ api, some ajax, and fancy css to return the same results as the major search engines. This isn’t innovation, but decoration.”
If this is true then it should be easily duplicated.
It is very precise though. Got the most accurate results ever from their service and not a bunch of unrelated results.
Any idea how you pronounce the name?
One thing is friggin annoying. Sometimes the search results I am not able to read as soon as the results are in a page covers it asking for my sign up info.
Dudes this is a huge turn off. Stop trying to grab user profile data and just provide a friggin service. You result pages is so cool, like a mix beteween a digg, Buzznews and regular search results.
I do not think that it is good idea. Time will show.
my work proxy blocks it flagging it as porn. lol.
testing cocomment