This post is not about the iPhone

Photo by ten safe frogs

You might have noticed the myriad of iPhone stories everywhere and perhaps you are getting just a little sick of them (Google Blogsearch shows about 200 posts about iPhone in the last hour).

Oh how I'd love to tell you about my iPod Touch 2.0 software update woes.

But instead, let me tell you about Scour. It's a new 'social' search engine in the same vain as Wikia (the hackable search engine). However, this time the difference is that you get 'paid' for searching and voting results up or down the rankings (an SEO's dream?). In fact you don't get paid, you get points, which apparently translate into a VISA gift card after you got millions enough. A nice variation on Microsoft Cashback.

How does it work?

Scour shows you the top results from Live, Yahoo and Google when you type in a query but ordered dependent on how useful people in the Scour community found that result.

"...we take the results from the 3 major search engines, (Google, Yahoo, MSN) Taking into account their current rankings. We then weight them against our own database to see what our users have said about where positions should be, and apply that weight to the results."

Interestingly, for each result, Scour shows what position that result had on Live, Yahoo and Google which means it is very easy to use Scour for monitoring search result positions across all the major search engines. It's not perfect though - some results show number 1 for Google but no ranking on Yahoo but then a quick check of the SERP on Yahoo.com shows a top 10 position for that same keyword. In other words - Scour isn't right every time.

If you are interested then have a look at the YouTube video here. Of course the most important and most relevant question is:

Will it be popular? No.

p.s turns out this post wasn't really about Google either. Sorry.

Comments

[Alex]

Hey Everyone!

Just wanted to let you know that we've made our first payout to a Scour user. Hit the link below to read the full story!

http://blog.scour.com/2008/08/05/and-the-first-scour-payout-goes-to/

Alex
Search Socially!
Scour.com