The search engine, Scour.com, is helping people get their voices heard on which websites are more valuable than others.  It’s changing the way searches are done and adding the social aspect to the scenario to make search results more relevant to users.

Thanks to Scour.com, searches could become more influenced by people in the future.  The way searches work on the website is that people put in a search term and a list comes up that is a combination of the three major search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  People then have the opportunity to vote on those results either to move them up or down.

Websites have the potential to do well on Scour.com if they provide the information that people want to see.  With this website, it is about more than just using the typical SEO tools to rank well.  It has to appeal to humans; this could mean visually as well as contextually.  Whereas, images and graphics don’t carry weight with the search engines, they can with people.

What this means for people searching for information is that they can rely on other people’s opinions and comments to guide them on which websites to look at and which ones to ignore.  While other search engines try to incorporate users’ information into their results, Scour.com does so in a more direct way.

The goal of Scour.com is to connect users and results to gain more accurate information.  By using the ideal of a social interaction, it is like having a friend tell you about a website that you need to check out, except you have a large group of friends recommending it to you.

Instead of dealing with complex algorithms that most people don’t understand, users can look at what others have said about a site and make their own determination about its value.  This puts searching back into the hands of humans instead of search bots and spiders.

To protect against abuse of the site, Scour.com checks for patterns that appear invalid or spam.  This ensures that the results they do count are from real people so that they are valid and trustworthy.

The goal of Scour.com is for people to get their voices heard on searching instead of relying on computers and automatic results.