Scour - Social Search with Benefits

I’ve been using a new social search engine called Scour for my searches today.

Scour aggregates content from Google, Yahoo and MSN into one results page. It is considered a “social search engine” which means it integrates algorithm driven technology with the user community’s input to increase the relevancy of the results. In this case, Scour takes the user contributed ratings and comments and adds them to the search results. People who use Scour get points for each search, as well as for leaving comments and ratings.

Registration was quick and easy with only a few fields of information required to get started. I could have chosen to add a bunch of friends and get points from their usage in a sort of network marketing, be then ambassador way. I’ll leave that to a starving college student.

When you search, you can choose to see the Scour results or Google, Yahoo or MSN’s results. If you have preference for which search engine results to display, you’re only a click away.

The user interface is very simple and follows all the normal search conventions. I liked the way the comments and rating features were integrated onto the search results page. It made it easy to remember to leave a comment and rate the content. (Because, you know, those are worth more points!)

Speaking of points, here’s how you earn them:

• Search – 1 point
• Vote – 2 points          
• Comment – 3 points
• Friend Referral – 25% of each friend’s points

Beside the points, what are the benefits?

Because social search leverages human judgment to determine relevance and rankings, it should yield more current and more relevant results. However, I’ve got to believe that’s somewhat offset by the fact that there are so many unique searches conducted it would take a long time for comments and rating to really impact results. During the time I searched today, I didn’t run into anyone else’s comments. But then, it just launched.

Scour is an interesting concept – particularly for people who like watching points accrue. I guess if you’re getting the same results you’d get on Google, Yahoo or MSN, but potentially earning a Visa gift card, why not? It will be interesting to see if it gains wide-spread adoption and among what demographic. After a normal day of search engine use, I’ve earned about 90 points toward the 6,500 I need to get a $25 Visa gift card. Just 73 days of searching left!

You can check out how Scour works here: