Techie Titbits

What is scour?
Scour is a web 2.0 social search engine. It pulls in data from Google, Yahoo and MSN and displays the combined results for your query. You see the results and click to go to any site like any other search engine. However you can do more. You can cast a positive or negative vote for a site suggesting it should go up or down in its rank or you can leave a comment. That is how the search engine becomes social like digg or reddit. The feedback of the searchers can affect the ranking of the websites. The interesting part for you is that they pay you for doing the searches, voting and putting comments. Interested? Join Scour.

Is it a scam?
Getting paid for searches? Sounds fishy? Well, it did sound too good to be true for me too. I am not sure if they are a scam but nevertheless I joined. Here are the reasons –
1> It’s free.
2> I searched over the net and so far nobody has reported it as scam.
3> They pull in results from google, yahoo and msn. So necessarily I am getting the same results I otherwise would have got. The search quality remains the same.
4> The site looks good and works smooth.
5> Several newspapers and leading blogs reported the launch of scour. Check it. So it's not a hush-hush thing.
6> It’s not a quick rich game. They don’t promise to pay you hundreds of dollars each month. The amount sounds reasonable. (More about the payments later.)
7> They display their ads with the search results which offset the money they pay the searchers.

How do I get paid?
You have to sign up first. You accumulate points when you do a search (1 point), vote (2 points) or comment (3 points) with the total points per search limited to 4 i.e. if you vote for 5 sites on the same search, you don’t get 1+2*5=11 points, you still get 4 points. This is very reasonable otherwise people will go crazy putting garbage votes just for points. Once you have 6500 points, you can redeem the points for a $25 visa card. Sounds good? Join Scour? Or …

Too bad! It will take me months to get that many points.

True! Very true! And that is why I joined. If it said that I could easily get $100 every month, I wouldn’t have trusted it. Think about the amount of people searching the net. They can’t pay out easy money. And anyway, how much do you get paid now for searching? Nothing! right? Why not get some money every few months? Join Scour.

Hmmmm .... alright, but still …

You are the skeptic type. No problem. I am like that too. If you are not convinced, think what you would lose by using scour? It’s free. You get the same search results. You are doing exactly what you usually do, just on a different site. If you are scared that you would get a lot of spam mail to your email address, use a non-official email id, may be create a new one. I also used an email id that I do not use for day-to-day purposes. But let me tell you, I never received any spam from them. I think it’s worth a try. What say? Join Scour!