Scour Review – Get Paid to Search the Web

Recently while on one of my favorite websites I came across a banner for a new site called Scour. Scour has all the makings of something really excellent wrapped into a nice clean package of a social search engine. Best of all, scour pays you to search, which is determined by points awarded by performing searches. Before starting this review off, let me mention that I’m still a new member but I’ll try to be as all encompassing as I can.

Hit the break for the full review!

If you want to learn about how to earn money, you can skip the intro to the app and go right to the how to earn money section.

Overview

Scour is owned and operated by ABCSearch, a 2ndteir search engine. Don’t let this weigh in on your opinion of Scour at all, the UI of scour is really excellent with a very clean design.  Scour is a Social Search engine which polls results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, (you can filter by engine if you’d like).  You earn points per search, comment, or vote you perform.

In order to take full advantage of the social features, and get paid you’ll need to create your account with Scour. You can register here (this link is a referral link, if you like this review please feel free to refer FH as your source, it’s always appreciated).

Upon registering you can download goodies such as a Scour toolbar for your browser (I.E., FireFox, and Opera are supported), or a plugin for your feed reader/homepage like iGoogle, Netvibes, Mac OSX Desktop, Windows Desktop, or Yahoo Widgets. I’ve opted out of these, but you do receive a small points bonus (not sure the amount) if you download the Scour toolbar. The toolbar is stated to be spyware/adware free, for your browsing confidence.

My Profile

From your “My Profile” screen you have access to a number of features, including your settings, friends, messages, invite a friend, your points, your comments, redeem comments, change password, and a points calculator (which is very handy). There is a button to send feedback from your profile, and you can also view your friends browsing history.

From your settings you can change the weight of the engines to customize the search results the way you like. Only want results from Google? No problem, just turn the sliders down for Yahoo and MSN. You can also edit the number of results from each engine, though Google is mysteriously capped at 8 while Yahoo and MSN return 10 results. Strange, no?

From your friends you can see which friends you’ve invited, and the number of points they have. Pretty self explanatory in this section.

Your messages section is where you receive messages from other members of Scour. You can change your mail settings to email you when you receive alerts, comment replies, or messages from other members.

From my comments, you can track your comments previously posted, as well as your friends comments for – All Time, This Month, Past 7 Days, or Past 30 Days, Most Recommended, Positive, and Negative. It’s pretty interesting that you can sort by positive and negative, which is useful in helping you develop as a positive member of the community.

My points breaks down your points in a few views – All Time, This Month, Past 7 Days, or Past 30 Days.

Redeem points helps you tally up your totals and subtracts your total points from the totals for each reward tier. For example, I have 90 points, and my total points to go to earn a $25 dollar pre-paid Visa is 6410. Not too shabby!

The points calculator is awesome. You simply enter the number of searches you will perform on a daily basis and the number of friends you’ve invited and scour comes up with the total that you could be earning a year. From one friend, and my 100 searches a day I could be making $738 a year!

The SERP’s

On your initial view of Scour, you can search by keyword on a home screen that looks similar to Google’s witha  few more bits of information cluttering up the homepage. Currently (Nov 08), there is a red area to the left of the search box, to remind visitors to vote for Scour in the Open Web Awards 2008. Underneath the search box, there’s also a more information panel which often explains what scour is, but also has a reminder for the Open Web Awards. You can close the area below the search bar by clicking the x, but not the red box on the left (sadly).

The SERP(Search Engine Result Pages)’s are very easy to navigate with sponsored listings on the top and right, similar to all of big 3 engines. The layout looks remarkably similar to Google, with Scour’s web 2.0 logo adorning the top left corner of the page.  If logged in your username will also appear on the top left where you can click “My Profile” to customize your profile information.

On the SERP, you’ll notice that each result has thumbs up, thumbs down, comments, and a really neat position listing which shows the position of the result you’re looking at in Google Yahoo and MSN. The positions per engine are extremely useful for webmasters who are looking to tell how they rank in multiple engines for a given query. Kudos to this feature, I’m all about it.

As for the thumbs up and thumbs down, these votes don’t seem to aggregate on the front end – meaning you can’t see a visual counter of how many thumbs up or down a given result has. You can however see how many thumbs (up or down) a given comment has. Upon clicking on the comments section, the comments populate your screen. I’d be curious to see how the comments are policed, as this could be extremely rough on websites with bad PR. Also, it’s interesting to consider how competitors might try to game the system (not trying to give anyone ideas).

Once you click on any result, your destination page will load, and at the bottom of the page there’s a small scour bar which allows you to rate and comment the site. It’s pretty handy to have this after viewing a new site, in case you do want to leave some feedback on the site you’re visiting.

Scour’s image search is both amazing and weak at the same time. The image search favors Flickr which is awesome if browsing only, but if you’re like us over here at FH and need images to post, you’ll find some difficulty in working with Flickr. Not to say you can’t do it, but it’s definitely more complicated. There are no  comments, or voting anywhere on the Image SERP, nor is there a scour bar on the image page. Not sure why that is, but it takes away from the cool.

Scour’s Video search is pretty good. Of the queries I’ve ran I found the same video in both Google and Scour (a video about Derren Brown in NYC). As with the image search, there’s no ability to comment, rate, and no scour bar once you land on the video destination page. Again, this sort of takes away from the usefulness of scour, but perhaps it will come in a later version.

How To Earn Money

Lets get into the details shall we? You’re awarded one point per search (for up to 100 searches a day). You also are awarded one point per comment, and one point per rating you leave for any webpage. The total you can earn is 300 points per day. Not sure why this limit is imposed, but it’s not all bad.

Once you reach enough points you can cash out. From the Scour FAQ:

Countries participating in the following rewards program include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, U.S., and U.K. :

* 6,500 Rewards Points may be redeemed for a $25.00
* 12,500 Rewards Points may be redeemed for a $50.00
* 25,000 Rewards Points may be redeemed for a $100.00

Countries not listed above are still eligible to participate in the following rewards schedule:

* 50,000 Rewards Points may be redeemed for = $5

If you’re consistently hitting 300 points per day, it would take you a little over 21 days to make $25 dollars. Not too bad! For those of you with that kind of dedication, keep doing your thing. I think realistically I’ll be likely to hit 100 points per day.

Some things to keep in mind when using Scour:

1. Use the Search engine as you would any normal search engine.
2. Don’t try to game the points system, you will likely get banned.
3. Try to leave useful comments, which provide something to the community.

Conclusion

Scour is pretty sweet indeed. Overall I’m very happy with the site and can see it becoming a part of my daily searching routine. The plus side is that it’s extremely easy to use, and allows you to greatly customize your search from changing the types of results which are brought back by engine, or through socially participating. The ability to leave comments in the SERP’s themselves is something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. It seems to be both a blessing and a curse, and will really take some time to flesh out before it’s useful on a greater scale. It would be excellent if you could rate images or videos, and leave comments for them. As a blogger many of my searches fall within these categories, and there’s nothing really keeping me at scour if I can’t enjoy all of the features for these kinds of searches.

Being paid to search is something that couldve fallen flat on its face if the user interface was poor and it wasn’t being backed by a reputable company within the industry. Scour has a lot going for it and it will be extremely interesting to see how it develops in the future. Get paid for what you do already and Register for Scour now!