Today we wanted to share one of the best parts of working at Scour- The blog posts Scour users make when they get their reward!!  This one in is from one of our scour leaders who definitely lives/dies up to their screen name!

One of our Scour users by the the name of “ZombieMoney” was nice enough to mention us on a blog after receiving a Visa Gift Card …we thought we would return the favor.  Zombiemoney has been a loyal Scour user since late July and is a testament to Scour rewarding our users, even those that consider themselves Zombies!

We also wanted to mention that we are currently reviewing another batch of individuals who have made it through to our final round of Cashout Review.  So if you have not heard back from us yet, just be patient…ZombieMoney was!

Scour On!

-The Scour Team

Since our launch, we’ve received tons of feedback from Scour users, so we’re pleased to be implementing some of your suggestions to help make you Scour experience even more efficient.  These updates should be live on Scour within a week.

Here is a taste of what we have been working on.  We look forward to hearing your feedback on these changes to Scour and please feel free to let us know what else we can do to make Scour easier to use and more enjoyable!

1. Faster Search Results!

We’ve improved search speed by 80%! Currently a search for “shoes”! is clocked at .634 seconds, our newly improved results will be .123 seconds! That’s even faster than Google at .16 seconds!

2. New Layout: We’ve removed the top sponsored results and added more listings per page to help you find what you are searching for quicker and clutter-free!

3. New Search Filter: Double click on any word in the results to add or remove the word to your search!

4. Open results in a new tab: The more tabs the better!

5. Site Search from Results: This will allow users to conduct a site search using their current query on any site in the results page.

6. Reply to comments: State your opinion on other people’s reviews.

7. And more….

Comment on this post and tell us what you think!

Scour On!

-The Scour Team

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