If you are into the world of social networking, this post is for you. Today, a Blocatalog friend of mine invited me to Scour, a social search network site similar to Searchboth, which provides results from Yahoo, Google and MSN on one page. Every Scour member can vote each listing up or down based on its relevance to their keyword as well as comment on their experiences with the site. The understanding is that by blending user feedback with proven search algorithms the Scour community shapes the Scour brand of results.
Apart from evolving search into a community of users sharing their search successes with others, Scour also rewards its members. Every member is awarded 1 point for every search, 1 for a vote and 1 for a comment with a maximum of 3 points a search. Once you aggregate at least 6,500 points you can cash them out for a $25 Visa gift card. If you are a searchaholic, then Scour is for you. The only thing that I hate about them is that the referral system is not fair. Why should someone be earning 25% of my points just because he referred me to them? This is very unfair! In stead of making the new users work for the older ones, Scour should be giving one-time referral bonus points from their own sources.
Once you bring money in the equation, you must be prepared to fight spammers from all over. I hope the guys at Scour have their own Matt Cutts and a skilled webspam team otherwise Scour will soon be history.
The other observation is that Scour does not have its own search engine. Scour relies on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Why don’t they come up with their own search engine and socialize it? What if Yahoo, Google and MSN stop them from using their search engines?
31 users commented in " If you a searchaholic, you can search socially with Scour! "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThis definitely makes searching easier. Thanks for the heads up!
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I believe I’ve seen my brother using Scour. The concept is interesting, though I do agree, why not come up with their own search engine? It will be interesting to see if the site lasts for the long-term.
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Sound like a nice SE. I think that is right way to add social factor to the search. Even google doing that now. Probably these guys are better. I’ll take a look =)
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Developing a working search engine algorithm is very difficult so I can see why they would be avoiding using their own search engine. What they could do is use Google’s, MSN’s, and Yahoo’s, until they generate enough votes and points, and then use that to try and show the best quality sites in their index. It’s a good concept though.
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Sounds like a great idea however I don’t know how long will they be able to avoid spammers and bots. As you said – when there’s money to be made there will be spammers and people who don’t care about community but their own business.
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I am not into social networking at all. I simply do not have the time.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 11:12 am
@Nicole: Wow! As a blogger who wants to become big, you have no choice because gradually your blog will become a social networking platform. It will force to go into facebook, twitter, myspace, stumbleupon, digg, mixx etc.
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Scour…interesting. Definitely need to check it out. Sounds as though it makes life much easier.
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In the past I’ve used a system like this from Ask.co.uk. However, the reward for a referral wasn’t 25%, it was 10%, then for a referral’s referrer 5%, then 2.5%, you get my idea. I didn’t earn too much money, but it was great because new users didn’t lose anything. If they won $20, then I received a $2, but the referrer would keep his $20. I never used Scour, and I don’t think I will ever use because it takes too much time and I could do something else with it.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 11:11 am
@Caesar: I agree with you scour needs much time. Which is why I said only searchaholics should go for it.
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Scour is a nice SE. but it must take more time to develop it’s algoritm for good results…
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Wow…I actually found someone using the same theme as me.
Interesting what you’ve done with it…check out mines and lets see if we can link up on somethings?
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 11:02 am
@Caleb: Interesting! I will surely link up with you.
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Going to look into it as you are the second person to mention it.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 11:00 am
@Bloggersource: All the best 🙂
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shame i call myself a “searchaholic” yet only heard of Scour in this post. Awesome piece. keep it up.
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Very interesting concept, idea and approach and development. The problem is that Google is far away ahead of MSN and Yahoo, and there is opened question why should we use it as Google is enough..
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 10:57 am
@George: That’s true. But with scour building their reward based search business based on the results that they get from Google, they will end up depriving them the traffic, especially with the introduction of their own toolbar.
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@Caesar
I think i’ve used the same site, gave up after two days. Wasn’t worth the hassle, would’ve taken me years to make an money.
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Thanks, I will give this thing a try,
Great blog and great post!
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Hmm, this sounds just like the global translator plug in – a great idea in principle but with serious problems in real life. I do notice sometimes when searching on google how results are not really on par, especially what ranking is concerned. It would be great if they implemented a simple user voting system without any benefits, except for SERP getting better. No wait, that would bring out the abuser again, wouldn’t it.
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im using twoiseven.com , by trying searchboth, i think the one you provided is more superior. i will be using searchboth as my primary resource.
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Thanks for the share. I’ll give this one a shot!
Leanie Belle
How To Earn Your First 100 Dollars Online
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It looks like Google’s personal results system. I will not be too amazed if Google will create a social network of that kind. Just to refine its SERP better…
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“I will not be too amazed if Google will create a social network of that kind”
Too true – if it works it will get bought (or copied!). If it doesn’t it will die…
Zander
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it looks nice but who have much time for it , as you said it need searchaholics only .
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sounds interesting, never been a searchaholic myself though.
well not anymore that is.
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This deal would take a lot of time to get that 6500 points and there is always a possibility of spam.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
April 25th, 2009 at 10:40 am
@John: 6500 points is too much. But I see some folks making money out of this service. They got to be really patient.
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duck duck go dot com is a similar search engine. I am sure these social search engines would never replace google and yahoo. I like search engines and wud love to participate in a project which ends up beating google.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:18 am
@Jhangora: Their major problem is that they do not come up with their own search engines. They use Google and Yahoo.
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