Today while surfing internet, in my office. One of my colleagues come up to me and asked me about Scour. I questioned him back “What is Scour? ” . He gave me the Scour web URL and came to known about this innovative search engine. Then I searched for few keywords like “Offshore DotNetNuke Development” and “Offshore Software Development” (without quotes) for my two sites www.encodexindia.com and www.dnn-india.com also mentioned in keyword anchor tags . I came across interesting thing it showed me search results for scour itself and three major search engines besides. That’s interesting and also with many other interesting features. So I thought of giving you brief information about Scour.com.
Scour was founded in 2007, Its original name was Aftervote.com, a search engine with an AJAX backbone with one mission: to deliver the most relevant results as efficiently as possible. Almost exactly 1 year later, Aftervote was acquired by Internext media, owner and operator of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded to Scour.com.
The main motive was to bridge the gap between searchers and relevant results. Scour provided a platform for the user to vote and comment on relevancy of the searches, which in return could help other searchers. Searchers could also connect with one another creating a true social search community, attained through innovative solutions to meet the needs of today's web searchers.
The brief distinct features of Scour.com are mentioned below:
- Site Comments: Users can post their comments on the search result and also view the comments posted by other users
- Images and Videos: Scour also offers search for Videos and Images.
- Account Customization: Users can have their customized profile along with search settings they prefer. All they need to do to avail this service is to open an account.
- Sort Search Results: Scour offers the facility to sort the search results provided by different search engines. This feature is beneficial for analyzing search positions on all 3 search engines by using just one search hit. Users can also view the search results offered by Google, Yahoo and MSN on one page.
- Monetary Rewards: Users can earn points for every search and 25% of the points which are earned by the friend you have referred. Users can encash these points for Visa Gift Cards.
- Rate a Result: Users can rate the result depending on the quality of the search results. Higher rating connotes better accuracy and thus enables better search for other users.
- Networking: Users can network with other scour users based on areas of common interest.
- Plugins: Scour offers good plugins and is planning to offer many more.
This social search engine has impressed me a lot. But some more things what I expect from Scour.com are that they should provide Cached date, Similar pages information, advance search filters and preferences or options which other search engine provides. Though its an social search engine, with above features included it could become a complete social search engine.
