Search Engine

I've been checking out a new search engine called Scour. Competing with Google is going to be a hard battle, but Scour has a few things going for it that I think can make it a little better than Google.

First off, they are social. I can go up there, check out a website and then comment on it in the Scour system. As I comment or vote for sites they move up or down the list, depending on the vote. This allows spam to be moved down the list and good sites to move up the list. Unlike other social media sites, the listed sites are not just limited to those that sign up. Like Google, every site is listed in the engine.

Since there are not yet very many votes or comments in the Scour system, they need to have something else in the background to help with the searching. They also need this in order to cope with sites that have the same number of votes. If people start using it, it could grow, allowing us to have a say in the search results is a good thing.

Many people do not need encouragement to be involved with social media. It is just fun to do. Scour does give some encouragement though, in the form of points. These points can then be turned in for money. Unless you search a LOT, and add a LOT of votes and comments, this builds up very slowly. In the few days I've been playing with it, including installing their Firefox search bar, I've earned about 200 points. I only need 6300 more to get a $25 prepaid visa card. However, they also give insentives to get me to get you to sign up. If you sign up with one of the links on this page, I get a 25% bonus of any points you earn. Don't worry, you don't pay them to me, they are in addition to what you get.

Another thing that makes Scour nice is that they give you Google, Yahoo! and Live results as well, so you can check all four sources to get the best results for you. Some times one source just does not have the results you want, so another source is useful.

Now, for the flaws in the system:

Spammers can vote up their stuff. Right now, being a new engine, a spammer can come in and vote their sites up. I'm not a spammer, but I voted for my sites. In the long run, this will not be a bad thing, if there are a lot of voters, then a few people voting poorly will not hurt the system. In the short run this will make it hard to get great results. They can easily overcome this by allowing people to vote for the voters. This will allow people to vote others up and down, giving more or less weight to their votes.

Those points. The points are nice, but they can also cheapen the system. Are they really needed? And can you let others know how many points you have? If you can brag about the points you have earned, showing a ranking of the highest earners, then you are going to get some vain people (admit it, most of us are a little vain) who want to see their names in the lists who will be voting in order to get on the list.

Cuil.com is a new search engine. Apparently some Google ex-employees decided to get together and compete with their former employer. Well, my first response is that it needs a lot of work.

I did a few searches and did indeed come up with some results. Some were relevant. I compared the search "Tired Garden" (with quotes) in Google and Cuil.

In Google, the first site to come up is TiredGarden.info. As a sub page it showed a contest being run. It then lists several Tired Garden entries on social networking sites and some other sites that use the term "Tired Garden" in the page. Without the quotes, the search comes up similar. First is the Tired Garden site and then some social networking sites. Then a few other sited that mention both Tired and Garden on the page.

Cuil did not do so well. First off, I can't tell which is the top entry. This could be a good thing, as it displays 11 on a page in three columns (why not 12, so they are even columns?) meaning that several have top display. The main concern that I have though is that of the 11 on the first page, 6 of them do not show the term "Tired Garden" in the display text. A few of those have the terms tired and garden on them, but not as a single term. Why is WhiteHouse.gov there?

Cuil has this nice thing where they show a picture next to the entry, but where do they get the pictures? I have no idea where the one next to TiredGarden.info comes from. I don't remember putting that picture anywhere on the site.

Cuil has potential, but they are not fixing any of the problems with Google. Overall, they are not worth jumping ship and going away from Google. There are several search engines that are better than Cuil. Yahoo, Dogpile, just about any other search engine I've used is better.