Sunday 2 November 2008

Scour pays users for what they already do, search!

Scour say their purpose is to "bridge the gap between searchers and relevant results". Results from the 3 largest search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live are agregated, in a rather slick interface, showing a summary of the page alongside which engines have indexed the result and how they have ranked the page. It also provides a platform for the user to vote and comment on relevancy, searchers connect with one another creating a social search community.
Unlike some of the other search engines that combine alogrithyms with user rating, the interface is extremely simple there is a thumbs up or a thumbs down for each result and an option to add a comment.

Founded in 2007, Scour was originally known as Aftervote.com, a 1 year later, it was acquired by Internext media, owner of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded as Scour.com

So, how does the paying users to search thing work? Well it appears to be quite simple, you get 1 point, for each serach, vote or comment you add, and you get 25% of the points of anyone you introduced to scour. There are also a few bonuses, for thins like downloading the toolbar or inviting friends. Once you aggregate 6,500 points you can cash them out for a $25 Visa gift card, which you can spend on whatever you want.

Earn money with Scour!

To get started simply click on the link above, set up an account and start searching.

My guess is this will be a bit like airmiles, in that while many of us will collect the points not many of us will ever make enough point to cash them in, and i'm not sure i really want to add another tool bar to my browser. Having said that the interface is quite clean and easy to use, and i do quite a lot of searching, so i might just give it a go.
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