Scour Cuts Down Sponsored Results to Enhance Speed

Posted by Vaibhav

October 23, 2008

Search engine Scour.com lately made improvements in its search function, cutting down the number of sponsored results displayed at the top of the page. The ‘Meta’ search engine which integrates results from top three search players – Google, Yahoo and MSN increased the number of listings overall and enhanced speed by 80%. It now claims that it provides results in below one second, posing competition to the leading search engines in the Market.

Prior, Scour’s results took two to three seconds to generate results, which the company found was unacceptable to several of its users, stated marketing director at Scour, Simon Chernin.

Along with gathered results, Scour provides a unique feature of get-paid-to-search based on point system. Each search, comment or vote generates a point for the users, who in turn can claim a $25 Visa card by reaching 6,500 points in total.

Google has dominated the search market since a very long time and several players have been struggling hard to capture the market share. Scour being a new entry into the competition also looks forward to pocket a part of this share and popularize its brand in the online world. Joining the rewards system bandwagon is another Google rival ‘Microsoft’ who recently introduced a rewards program for its search engine.

Users of Microsoft’s SearchPerks program are enabled to accumulate tickets for any search operation they perform using the Live Search service. These virtual tickets can then be redeemed for prizes like games for Microsoft’s Xbox video game system, music downloads and airline miles.

In a statement, President and Chief Executive of Scour, Daniel Yomtobian believes that speed is particularly essential with relevancy of course, and said that the company is quite competitive in tests against the best search engines, even as it aggregates results from three search engines.

Increasing speed is not the only improvement it has made for its users. Search filtering is another area of improvement that the company has undertaken; allowing users to double click on any word in a set of results and add or remove the word to a further search. Moreover, users can now apply a current search query to any site shown on the results page. Scour has made further improvements to organize user comments better and enable them (users) check their points total without navigating away from the current page.

As for future plans, Chernin said that other improvements are in process, wherein the company plans to release further customization based on user-provided profiles in the coming 30 to 60 days.

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