alex.moskalyuk

Back in 2007 HitWise published the findings that 1% of searchers conduct 13% of searches, and hence these power searchers became the coveted audience among the search startups. Most of them try to get to the 1% through some sort of rewards club. Live Search Club promises prizes in exchange for the searches conducted on Live.com.

Scour now combines Google, Yahoo! and Live results into a single interface, and pays out 1 point for searching, 2 points for rating a search result in a Digg-style manner, and 3 points for commenting on a search result, hinting at some attempt at social search. What do points get you? 25k points equal a $100 gift card, half of that is a $50 gift card, and 6,500 points equal a $25 gift card.

I was always happy to sell my Firefox searchbox to a highest bidder, and used to use Blingo, where I even won some movie tickets occasionally. Lately Blingo dropped Google search results, and substituted them with a combo of paid ads and organic results from Yahoo! and Live (bad idea because of paid links appearing in top 3 results for anything), so Scour looks like the next best thing to come after that. Currently 34,000ish rank on Alexa, but climbing quite fast.

Sign up through my referral, if you’re interested. The results pages seem to be clean, although navigating to the results page is always accompanied by a frame that has the ratings widget.