www.Scour.com – World’s own Web 2.0 Social Search Engine

www.Scour.com – World’s own Web 2.0 Social Search Engine

How is scour different from anything else? What is a social search engine anyways? Can Scour – Social Search Engine gives Google, Yahoo, Microsoft a run for their money?

How is Scour different from the rest?

Scour – the social search engine, is a reward based search engine which brings in the search results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, all together with their rankings. You can comment and vote for the search results that you get and you don’t have to switch to various search engines to get the best results which are most relevant for you.

The huge opportunity this social search engine brings is to involve the individual searching into the revenue sharing model. This incentivising technique attracts the individual to come back and search on scour and nothing else.

Social search, I guess, was the only phenomenon left in the Web 2.0 space which was started by the social search engine AfterVote and is now known as Scour! Dan Yomtobian, CEO, Scour.com explains the concept behind Scour in the Video below:

What is Social Search?

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. When applied to web search this user-based approach to relevance is in contrast to establish algorithmic or machine-based approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents.

Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms.

The Search experience revolves around the outcome of collaborative harvesting, collaborative directories, tag engines, social ranking, commenting on bookmarks, news, images, videos, podcasts and other web pages. Examples of user input include social bookmarking or direct interaction with the search results such as promoting or demoting results the users feel are more or less relevant to their query.

Some time ago AfterVote was acquired by ABCSearch, one of the largest pay-per-click search companies in the world. As a result of this acquisition, the product has a much better backing for growth and quality and its offerings are now bigger and better with this move. The original core development team from Thinking Big is still deeply involved in Scour, but it has more resources, better servers and a richer brain trust to improve the quality and accuracy of daily information search needs.

So what would be the next step? Will Google, Yahoo and Microsoft acquire stake in this company? I guess considering MS couldn’t lay its hands on Yahoo!, Scour’s popularity might attract MS to consider a stake.

Also, interestingly the commenting and voting attracts the individuals to look around which can also mean that click/ad revenue Scour search engine might be better. This clearly means that advertising dollars would start flowing in for Scour.

However, monetizing commenting is not that great an idea as it would lead to spam comments and would eventually be of no use to anyone. If there is no moderation / trusted member validating comments, it would lead to disruption of search results which will go against the pure reason of existence of Scour – ie Search.

As of now I am starting Scouring but the real fate of Scour needs to be determined in the coming years!