Happy Rosh Hashanah to our observing Scour users!

For those who may not know much about the holiday, it is the celebration of the Jewish new year. You can find out more about Rosh Hashanah scouring it!

Happy New Year!

The Scour Team

Lots of time and thought goes in to running a search engine, and an equal amount of consideration must go in to creating a social network. But what about when the two are added together? We at Scour would like to provide our users with the very best in content and give them the arena to voice their opinions on the search results they are receiving.

We recently spoke with Susanne Koch from Pandia Search Engine News about the thoughts that go in to running Scour. You can view the interview here.

Thanks to Susanne for taking the time to speak with us!

-The Scour Team

It is our continued mission at Scour to build a search community, one that fosters communication between the user and search results to order to create the best search experience possible.  After all, how can we call ourselves a social search engine, if it lacks that critical communication?

Keeping with this theme, AltSearchEngines wrote a great piece on Scour and the value of human-powered search a few days ago.  We’re glad to see they recognize that Scour is truly a social search engine relying on the Scour user community to make the results better.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

Thanks to AltSearchEngines for the write-up!

-The Scour Team

Doing some research for business cards on Scour, we came across a great blog post on CreativeBits with some very creative business card designs.

They say the first impression is the most important one and we’re sure these make quite an impression!  Our favorite is the Divorce lawyer, although it’s not the most positive of professions, we felt the creativity was executed masterfully!

Click here to check out the rest and make some Scour comments on the ones you like best!

-The Scour Team

It seems you can’t turn on your radio or TV without being bombarded by news of the U.S. Presidential Candidates lately. Just within the last week alone, both Republican and Democratic candidates selected their choices of Vice Presidents which led to another wave of stories (some more scandalous than others). It does inspire one to do a bit of research though and find out what exactly is being said on our Presidential hopefuls.

So what details are you digging for? In the spirit of community and democracy, share what useful sites, stories, and factoids you’ve learned through your Scour searches on the comments section and our Facebook Wall. Did you find some funny pictures of one of the candidates? Some great comparisons of the two on key issues? Educate the Scour Community and earn some points in the process!

To get it started, we found a nice side by side roundup on McCain and Obama using Scour on The Washington Post website (gave it a big thumbs up rating) which includes news coverage, fundraising, and campaign schedules.

We have received a lot of great feedback and are excited to announce that we have improved our image search results.  As of now we are using Flickr photos to populate our image search. We felt that this was a necessary change due to some of the short-comings of our previous filters.  Scour wants to ensure that we are doing our best to make image searching a safe and fun tool for the whole family.   The search is pretty basic now, but we want to know how your would like to improve it.  Are there any new engines, features or additions you would like to see?  Let us know!

-The Scour Team

One of our users alerted us to a test that TheSEOCyclone.com ran recently between Cuil, Google, and Scour to find out which search contender  provided the most results. After plugging in the search query “How to use a tachograph,” the results filed in and Scour came out on top with more than both Cuil and Google. Check out the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy9ogqugbWc&hl=en&fs=1]

Though not a common search phrase, this was a great example of what makes Scour so unique. Not only are results pulled from the three giant search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), but the top results will be those that other users have found most relevant, as opposed to the most optimized by a set of SEO marketing experts.

This kind of social search is like a fine wine, it gets better with age. As feedback from users on a search term or phase grows, the less work a person will have to do in order to find what it is that they’re searching for. Everyone over time chips in to help you out!

A big thank you to TheSEOCyclone.com for keeping us in mind!

-The Scour Team

Just wanted to let everyone know that our servers are being updated right now and you might have some bounce backs when trying to email Scour or Scour Support (as some of you have already pointed out). This is only temporary and they will be up and running shortly!

Thanks so much,

Scour Team

Picture Courtesy of Active.com

The last several weeks following our launch have been quite a mix of experiences for the Scour Team. We are thrilled with the success and number of users that have made Scour their dedicated resource for search. However, we’ve also endured countless instances of false “users” who have attempted to gain rewards through invalid usage as defined by our community guidelines. After careful debate following research into the impact of gamers on our system, we’ve concluded that in order to maintain the quality and integrity of our search network we must make some revisions to our points and rewards guidelines. As we have identified patterns of invalid usage concentrated in specific geographic areas, we will be initiating the following changes so as to continue to reward as many true Scour users as possible:

Our revised points schedule for all territories will be as follows:
·Search = 1 point
·Vote = 1 point
·Comment = 1 point
·Max amount of points per search = 3

*Points are earned from the first 100 daily searches with a maximum of 300 total points per day.

Our current rewards schedule (6,500 points = $25) will continue for the following territories: US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Spain. For all other regions, there will be a modified rewards structure: 50,000 points= $5.

The Revised Scour Rewards Schedule will be implemented August 29th, 2008. Any user with valid activity in the territories not mentioned above with over 3,000 points on August 29th will be eligible for the $25 rewards payout once they reach 6,500 points. The revised Scour rewards schedule will be applicable thereafter.

As an additional effort to promote high quality comments, there will be a 30 character limit for all comments. We hope this will encourage users to leave detailed comments that describe their experiences and any other useful information for the Scour community.

We want to assure you that our goal first and foremost at Scour is to build a superior search experience through global community participation and secondly share our success by rewarding the users for their contributions. We understand that these revisions will be an inconvenience to some, and appreciate your patience.

For those users who have requested a cash out, payment will be sent once your activity and friend points has been reviewed for valid usage. Currently this will take 2-4 weeks while we make our way through the invalid user requests.

As we continue to grow and fortify our technology, we are confident that we will be able to offer an expanded rewards system in the near future.

Here are some upcoming features and upgrades we are working on:

-Faster search results
-upgraded search interface
-Scour friend messaging
-Social plug-ins
-Detailed user settings
-Advanced search options
-And much more!

Thank you for your continued support on Scour and we look forward to improving your search experience!

-The Scour Team

Just in case anyone has ever doubted Google’s ability to throw a party, let us assure you that they know what they are doing. The Scour team recently just got back from Mountain View, California- home of the Google Campus and it sure was a night to remember. There was loud music, fun activities, and LOTS of great food. It  was like a really sophisticated frat party, only the cool guys were Googlers:-)

Our Scour Google Doodle!

Some of the Scour Team:

But enough about us! Scour wants to hear about any of YOUR Google experiences.  Let us know how Google makes your day more exciting!  Is there anything you wish Google did to make your searching easier?

-The Scour Team