Hey Scour Community,

The past few days have been truly exciting. We are seeing tremendous amounts of traffic coming our way and as a result we are needing to upgrade some of our hardware!

We are looking forward to these improvements and it will allow us to grow exponentially over the next few months.

During this upgrade, we do expect a few random hiccups but overall we should be back up to speed within a few hours.

Thanks for hanging in there,

Team Scour

So we recently came across a fun blog post on SixRevisions.com which compares the changes that some of the earlier search engines have undergone over the past 10 years…can you believe how long it’s been!?

So take a look at the post here, it’s always fun to see the evolution of search engines as time passes. Our favorite old search engine design is Hotbot.com with their neon green background…what were they thinking?

With less than 2 years under our belt, we have already undergone a few changes to our homepage since our launch in 2008 and are looking forward to seeing what our site will look like in another 1 - 2 years from now.

If you have thoughts or ideas on what Scour will or should look like in the future, feel free to submit a .jpg or your description to support@scour.com.

Thanks,
Team Scour

Hey Scour Community,

These are busy times right? Who has the time to upload an avatar to your profile? If you don’t already have one, to help you out we’ve taken the liberty of assigning your Scour profile with one. We hope this will give the community some more color.

You can view the avatar that was assigned to your account by visiting your Scour Profile and if you decide you would like to change it, no problem, simply change it by clicking on the avatar image uploading the image of your choice.

Thanks!

-Team Scour

Hey Scour Community,

Thank you for all of your feedback regarding our planned $25 daily cash giveaway, which was going to be the replacement for our Scour points program. We read all of your comments and suggestions and the overwhelming majority of users feel that we should focus our resources and efforts on core and new Scour features and usability. As a result we have decided not to move forward with the $25 daily program that was scheduled to begin September 1, 2009.

Scour is now able to focus its resources primarily on your experience, our own search speed and many more upgrades.

Over the past year, we have received many great suggestions from the community as to what we can improve on Scour, several which have already been implemented into our new homepage design. All feedback is taken into heavy consideration to help enrich the Scour community. With our focus narrowed, we’ve been able to make fast progress on some brand new features we’ll soon be rolling out over the next few months, including:

1. Facebook/Twitter Integration
2. Search in different languages
3. Add more Google results
4. New Scour homepage design
5. Implement local search /maps
6. Implement new layout/design to serps
7. Add chat within search results
8. Reply to Comments
9. And more!

Scour has always worked toward the goal of being a search engine for the users, and made better by its community. We continue to welcome your feedback and look forward implementing requests that make Scour.com a truly unique social search engine. As always, we want to hear what you think would make Scour.com better.

-Team Scour
Please note: The previous point reward system is still discontinued as of September 1, 2009.

Dear Scour Community,

We’ve given away $3,000 over the past 3 months! Time goes by so quickly, so let’s take a look back at the give-aways to the lucky 3 Scour users!

It has been an exciting event, and we look forward to providing you with more ways to win in the future.

Thank you for participating,

Team Scour

(UPDATE TO REWARDS SYSTEM, READ HERE: http://blog.scour.com/2009/09/01/scour-focuses-on-search-and-features/ )

Dear Scour Users,

Over the last year we have seen tremendous growth thanks to the feedback from the Scour community. As a result, we are excited to announce that we are upgrading our current point rewards system as of September 1, 2009, and instead we will be offering a daily cash giveaway of $25, 7 days a week! This new cash giveaway rewards program is available to users in ALL countries around the world.

The rules are very simple; you are given 1 daily giveaway entry for every search, vote and comment on Scour. Each point enters you into our $25 daily Cash Giveaway drawing. This means that if you have a total of 10 searches, Scour will award you with 10 entries to win $25 for that day. The more that you search and participate on Scour, the more entries you will receive with a daily max of 350 entries per day. At the end of the day, the daily $25 Scour Cash Giveaway will reset giving you another chance to win!

You will also be happy to know that there are no restrictions to how many times the same person can win per week or per month. This means that you can win daily if you are chosen as the winner.

Scour Referrals:

The Scour referral system also also lets you take advantage of the giveaway. With the new rewards system in place, users will receive 1/4 (25%) of a give away entry for every search, vote and comment that their friends do. This means that for every 4 giveaway entries your “invited” friends generate, you will receive 1 additional daily Scour Giveaway entry.

Note: These fractions of an entry do not carry over to the next day.

What does this mean for the current points you earned?

As a thank you for all your past participation, during our transition to the new $25 daily Cash Giveaway we are offering the following BONUS:

As of September 1, 2009 all point accumulations will stop and Scour users will be awarded with extra daily search entries for the month of September 2009:

Users with:
1 - 1,500 points will receive 25 daily search entries for 30 days
1,501 - 3,000 points will receive 50 daily search entries for 30 days
3,001 - 4,500 points will receive 75 daily search entries for 30 days
4,501 – 6,000 points will receive 100 daily search entries for 30 days
6,001 - 7,500 points will receive 125 daily search entries for 30 days
7,500 + points will receive 150 daily search entries for 30 days
Note: The daily entry cap for the day is still 350.

August 31, 2009 will be the last day to redeem your points at the minimum 6,500 cashout level. As of September 1, 2009 the current point system will stop and you will have a chance at winning $25 every day, simply by searching, voting and commenting.

Winner Notification:

Daily cash giveaway winners will be notified via a Scour Inbox message. In order to assure prompt payment, please check your Scour Inbox regularly or make Scour your homepage so that you don’t miss out on free cash. The Scour Inbox email will only ask you for a PayPal address and will not ask you banking or other personal information. These messages will only be sent through our Scour Account. Those who do not respond within 30 days will lose their claim for the $25. So keep an eye on your inbox.

Keeping track of Scour Entry Points

Scour users will continue to view the number of entries that they have through a daily “sweepstakes entry counter” on the results page which will tell them the number of daily entries they have.

We’re excited about continuing to provide our users with superior search results with a little extra on top.

Thank you!

-Team Scour

With all of the latest news about MSN and Yahoo, its nice to know that people are still searching for alternative search engines. We recently uncovered an article where Charles Arthur gives Scour a shout-out as an alternative search engine.

Thanks Charles!
-Team Scour

Scour.com now offers realtime search results! Now while you’re scouring the internet, you’ll be seeing results in real time - in addition to what Scour originally returned. This is a huge step forward for Scour, as we’re the world’s first collective search engine to combine realtime search with traditional web results.

Sounds interesting right? But, what is “realtime”, anyway?

Realtime results are what people are talking about RIGHT NOW on the web - like tweets, Digg posts, those YouTube videos that people are watching and sending to friends, and other actively viewed content on the internet.

One of the biggest issues with trying to see everything in realtime is the massive overload of content – there’s just SO much stuff. If you’re wondering what the capital of Greenland is, realtime search results probably won’t help you find that. But our traditional results probably will.

With Scour, you now get a mix of the stuff that is happening live, along with all that good traditional search stuff which we love and need.

We’d like to send out a big thanks to our friends at OneRiot for joining with us on this new adventure. Using their new API, we were able to integrate their feed, which collects some of the most viewed and discussed content available on the web.

If you are interested in learning more about realtime search, check out:

http://searchengineland.com/what-is-real-time-search-definitions-players-22172

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/10/crunchup-live-real-time-search-panel/

Thanks for Scouring,

Team Scour

It looks like the Scour word is getting out to the streets. Not only are people “tweeting” about Scour but they are even promoting us around town!

Below you will see one of our Scour Fans, sporting one of the T-Shirts we gave away at the LA Twiistup Event a few months ago…

Thanks for spreading the good word!

-Team Scour

Hey Scour Fans,

Wired.com recently published a story which gave tribute to “Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google” and of course Scour was mentioned

It is great to see that even with all the search engines out there, Scour.com is being recognized as an industry leader in social search.

A big thanks to the author, Ryan Singel over at Wired.com for writing this great article and for mentioning Scour along with all these other great search engines. It has been an excellent year for us and we are looking forward to our continued growth.

Also, as always, we are always looking to get feedback and suggestions on what you would like to see added/changed on Scour. You can also visit our feedback page to read what other users have suggested and cast your votes on the importance of each suggestion.

Thanks again!
-Team Scour