History of Scour…

We’re a brand new social search engine designed to provide the best results combined with the social functions we’ve come to rely on to share information online with our peers and those with shared interests.

But before Scour, there were two very special search engines that both contributed to what Scour has become today. On this page we’ve preserved some of the blogging and musing from those who came before, just to give you an idea of where are roots are.  We’ve gone through many changes to make this the best social search site around… if you want to know more about where we came from, see below!

Where we came from…

Great… Another search engine.

Boy do we hear ya, and what makes us think that this has any chance of being better than the all-mighty search gods Google, Yahoo and MSN? Its easy actually. Younanimous is a new twist on a old idea. For years now, sites have existed as “meta search engines” which would search Google, Yahoo and MSN. The problem with these search engines was they were unfeasably slow, as they had to query Google, Yahoo, and MSN before they had anything to display.

Enter Younanimous: With an AJAX backbone, YOU Search Google, MSN, and Yahoo and let us know what you found and then we rank them for you, while providing additional detail about each result such as Alexa ranking, Google Pagerank, domain age and much more.

So what, it’s a fast meta search engine. Who cares? Wait, there’s more… Not only are we a meta search engine, but we also have a passive voting system in place. Today, everyone is familiar with sites like Digg and Shoutwire. These sites let the users decide what is a good story, and what’s not. We are applying this same principle to search results without having to go through all that work of clicking buttons to vote for a site’s “coolness”. Here’s a example. You do a search for “Social Search Engine” and you click the first result. It’s not what you were looking for at all, and is therefore not a useful result for your query. You press the back button and try result #2. Voila! You found exactly what you are looking for. But it’s more than that. Younanimous is analyzing these results and has cast a vote for you, automatically, saying that result #1 wasn’t what you wanted, but #2 was. If you do however find a awesome site, You can manually vote for it as well.

Ever find sites that never have the info you want, but are always at the top of the serps? Yes, we are looking at you Experts-Exchange.com… Well, now you can blacklist pages or entire domains from showing up in your listings, No more crap! And say goodbye to spam. With a “Spam!” Tag, you can help eliminate bogus results from the serps one spam site at a time.

Dont take our word for it, try this. Do a Google, MSN, or Yahoo search for a common spammer term. Viagra would be a good test. Look at how on these engines, spam just takes up all the spots. Now try it on Younanimous. You will be hard pressed to find anything unofficial, and thats why Younanimous works.

Another cool thing is that you don’t need a account to enjoy all the awesomeness of Younanimous. It’s all stored in a cookie! Of course, you can create one if you want to, and share your settings at work and gramma’s house, but it’s totally up to you!

But theres more! Amazing coolness awaits as you can develop your own widgets and algorithms based upon your searches! Do you value Alexa rank more than life itself? Now you can have the sites with the highest Alexa rank at the top! What about a combination of Google Pagerank and Alexa? That works also! Domain age? Yep. Del.icio.us links? Yep. Digg homepaged? Yep. You name it, you can have it.

And finally, We know we dont even ‘come close’ to being as cool as Google. Fact is, we wouldn’t exist without the fantastic work of Google, MSN, and Yahoo. So props to you big company’s who have made the web what it is. We salute you!

AfterVote = #1 on “The 100 best undiscovered websites of 2007″