In this article I am going to share my observation on a search engine scour.com; which claims to be a social search engine.
I would like to randomly point out few of my observations
- They are try to give a new face to search introducing socialization in searching; instead of reading full clicking on link and reading whole thing I can read comment from fellow users; provided some body has already commented on th result, but again this can easily be spammed with useless and misleading comments I really don’t know how they are going to handle that.
- The search is cumulative of results from scour, msn, yahoo, google that possibly could give you good results but what I got was not always useful; but still it is a good feature to see in place. But I would like to know what they are doing with all these results before displaying it and how they are claiming that result is optimum.
- If you type a string which does not give any result on any of the search engines it goes into unknown state and even does not tell you whats wrong; it keeps on displaying searching; I have reported this to them but no response.
- Time taken for search is higher than any other search engine but that should be expected as it searching three search engines and giving you the results but magnitude is higher than what is expectable; the search which took Google 0.06 seconds scour took around 2.13 seconds and as we say time is money a lot of money is getting lost out there.
- Worst part for me is that while browsing a result you can not find out what page of the site you are as you get a constant link like this http://scour.com/view/result/?URL=http://www.python.org/ this will remain like this what ever page you navigate; this has a reason behind it to enable you to vote and comment on the result but from usability point of view its not good.
- They are trying to buy publicity and attention; they have some point system for different actions like searching, commenting on search results, voting on search results and if you are able to reach 6500 points you get $25 visa gift card; I even read some one complaining of being banned when he was about to reach the mark; this raises some fingers on credibility of the company but I will leave it on company to answer that.
I would like to conclude with a thumbs up to them for the idea but idea can only become great if it can be implemented properly. You can not get success and publicity just by throwing some dollars here and there.
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[...] Nataha wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
Hi, I work with the Scour team as a freelance designer. I just wanted to take a moment to respond to some of your points.
Comment Spam – Nice to see someone agrees with me here. I first discussed it with the lead programmer about 5 days ago. At that time there was already 79,000 comments which is pretty crazy considering the age of the site. I pointed out a few (albeit obvious) things that could be done to handle some of the comment spam and he agreed and said it’s top priority. We do have changes coming in this department.
Ordering the Results – When Scour was still Aftervote there was a nifty settings panel that allowed you to customize all of this by assigning weights to each search engine. This feature will be returning (In fact, I’m currently redesigning the entire settings panel now for a launch early next week with luck). Since the panel isn’t available currently all users are set on a more or less “default” balance between the 3 major search engines.
Scour gets lost with no results – They’re normally quick to respond, but they have had some issues with the email system. New servers are being brought online though. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for the lack of response. I passed a link to your post to the lead programmer.
Search Time – This is another major item on my complaint list currently. We’ve had several discussions about lowering the time and it’s very high priority on the list. For my part, I will be rewriting the markup for search results. I’ve learned a few things since I originally coded it and my goal is to decrease the size to 40% of current. Keep an eye out for (hopefully) big speed increases.
Follow bar (As someone other than me named it) – You’re not the first person to complain about this. I’m personally (Note that I’m not a Scour employee nor are my opinions necessarily shared by them) against it in general for the reasons you state. But until I can come up with an easy solution that allows people to comment/vote and get their points after visiting a result, the follow bar will remain. I’ll make the close button larger when I update the design though.
Paying for traffic – I’m a really terrible person to comment on this. I run several websites, and none of them get the kind of traffic Scour is getting right this second. I will say though, several people have already been paid (Last I heard from a few days ago, 5 payments were cleared, 1 received, 2 sent and 2 waiting for a shipping address). The service is legit. While a search engine “buying traffic” in this method is certainly unheard of with the 3 Search Giants, I really think it’s working great for Scour. It’s all about the end result, which is of course better search results for everyone. Since that depends on the users themselves I’m not about to criticize what’s gotten Scour over 100,000 members in less than a month.
About the guy getting banned, while I’m not sure about that guy in specific, I do know that a WHOLE LOT of people are trying to game the system. Crazy type stuff. People doing thousands of searches an hour. Referring themselves 30+ times. All of this of course gets people banned (rough word for what actually occurs: Bans for abuse on Scour involve not earning points rather than losing site access entirely). The abuse detection system is coming along beautifully, but I have no doubt it’s possible in some circumstances for power users to get lumped in with scammers. Luckily, the Scour team is a bunch of friendly people. If you were not doing anything wrong, an email to them should be all it takes to patch things up. However, if they see you made 1000 comments saying “Good site”, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sorry for the long winded response.
Thanks for the article!
Thanks for such a elaborate reply.
I already said that I really liked the concept and what I wrote here was what I felt and it was my unbiased opinion on the system.
I wish scour team to have great success and to you as well
Cheers
hey vishwajeet, first thing, a congrats for getting a scour personel to reply to your blog, because they hardly seem to be listening to mails hahha!
next thanx to the scour employee for replying, it did clear quite a few doubts, but few of them are still hanging around my mind:
1. why doesn’t scour a proof of their payment?
2. why don’ they respond through email?
3. what is it with other countris than us\canada….dont they get the isa facility?
4. when ppl are critisizing scour of banning them etc. on their own blog, why is scour not replying and clearing the due confusion?
I’d be glad if the freelancer employee replies again.
Peace.
To clarify, I am NOT a scour employee. I worked on the site back when it was Younanimous, and then for a few months while it was AfterVote. When development slowed, I moved on to other projects.
I did make a post on the official Scour blog, but it managed to make it into the moderation queue.
To (unofficially) answer your questions based off what I do know.
1. Last I heard they should’ve posted proof a few days ago. All of the official PR is handled by Scour’s owner, ABCSearch.
2. The Scour feedback email address is receiving about 900 emails every day. I’m not sure how many people answer them, but a lot of it seems to be handled by the lead programmer, who also happens to be the guy that’s adding new features/fixing bugs/etc. Best thing I can tell you is that every email does get read. It just may take a bit of time for them to reach yours.
3. This is clarified somewhere on the website/blog. I believe (don’t quote me) that as long as you’re a legal resident of your country, and VISA operates there, you’ll be paid the same as anyone else.
4. I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer. On my own personal (much smaller) websites I try to answer negative feedback as promptly as possible. Scour is not a little website. And I’m not a PR department. Since I have the smaller website approach to things though, I’m trying to respond to people myself as an unofficial voice. At the same time though, I’m trying to exercise job security and not step on anyone’s toes.
Vishwajeet – Apologies for hijacking your comments here. Oh, and thanks for the articles on SVN, I’ve never worked with source control before and have been looking for some simple tutorials to get started with.
No issues; I am just giving a platform to other people to know what the truth is; I am glad to have you answering questions.
Cheers
Pleasure again that tritelife hit us back, which was certainly unexpected, but anyway, one thing i couldn’t really understand was, that at one point you quote scour as a big website, but at the other point, you stated it had only one eprson handling the support system !! now that’s something they should really look forward too, since they really don’t lack the required potential, and neither do they lack the required users, what they are really lacking is the fact that they have left many pages of the “confusion” book unturned, which is creating bugs in the minds of the users, as to whether the time and energy they are putting is, is actually going to a right place or not.
One more thing, if you are the one handling the blog, whenever I have commented, My comment has been getting rejected by the moderator(you in this case!), now I basically write the negative things i am facing in scour, is that the reason?
Or probably I use CAPS quite a few times, which is regarded as shouting at some places, could that be a reason?
Thanks for your help and quick reply.
You’re misunderstanding a lot of what I’m saying.
1. I said I didn’t know how many people answer the feedback email address.
2. The Scour blog is handled by the PR team from ABCSearch.
I’m just a freelance designer that happened to design 90% of the website last year. Nothing more. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
ok scour came out with a payment proof……thats pretty good
but the question still ermains….
“WILL I GET BLOCKED WHEN I REACH THE CASH OUT POINT”
annd since it is randonly happening, the best answer will be the one I get once i reach that point myself.
so yuh….
*crosses his fingers*
I’ll give myself a best of luck at 5000
wait and watch that all what I can say; my best wishes to you
Though I don’t know I am getting positive vibes for scour.
Cheers
thanx vishvajeet….bu there is the bad news
they are only paying to those who have :
1. made no more than 2 searches per minute
2. who haven’t used related search too frequently….
at least that’s what got from one of the comments on their blogs……
IF THATS TRUE XD
i’m out of scour LAWL
i did both of them to the limit
anyway…lets hope for the best
whats yr score by the way?
I am not in to searching using scour; I still use google; some time if I remember of scour I will do to searches on by google and other by scour lol!!
My score is reaching 800 now. I repeat a lot of searches but thats what I do normally also.
I want scour to be good to themselves as well as others and they should do what they say; if they don’t than better not say it. I guess these clauses were not there initially.
Hope you get the visa gift card
True man, very true. I am on the cashout level now =P….
lawl
thanx anyway….
i’ll let you know whatever happends..
and yeah you are true…….google still remains ace….
you know, people are just simply *used* to it…….
Go ask a kid to name website….
you know what he would say
and as far as yahoo ans msn go…people are hardly bothered.
If its not on GOOGLE, its nowhere.
PEACE
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“1. made no more than 2 searches per minute
2. who haven’t used related search too frequently….
at least that’s what got from one of the comments on their blogs”
Where did you see this?
How do you know about :-
“1. made no more than 2 searches per minute
2. who haven’t used related search too frequently….
at least that’s what got from one of the comments on their blogs”
??
The search engine works pretty well. Thanks for the article.