Type of site | Web search engine |
|---|---|
| URL | www.Scour.com at theWayback Machine (archived February 29, 2000) |
| Launched | November 3, 1997; 27 years ago (1997-11-03)[1] |
| Current status | Closed |
Scour Inc. was amultimediaInternet search engine, and providedScour Exchange, an earlypeer-to-peer file exchange service.
Scour was founded by five students (Vince Busam, Michael Todd,Dan Rodrigues, Jason Droege and Kevin Smilak) from the Computer Science Department of theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in December 1997. By mid-1998 Ilya Haykinson andTravis Kalanick, also Computer Science students at UCLA joined the founding team. It moved into the spotlight a year later when in June 1998, Scour received its first investment from former Disney presidentMichael Ovitz andRon Burkle of Yucaipa companies.
The company's early products were anSMB search engine andScour Media Agent, aWindows application to download files from SMB shares. The search engine would probe IP addresses for publicly shared files and then index them for download by other users.
In 1998, the company developed aweb search engine as well,crawling theWorld Wide Web for links to multimedia audio, video and images.
In 1999 Scour received an investment fromMichael Ovitz and theYucaipa Company, an investment arm of the billionaireRonald Burkle.[2] Together, the total investment represented a controlling share in the company. After the investment, Scour expanded in terms of product offerings and personnel. The company launched a software product named MyCaster which allowed users to stream audio over the network, optionally mixing microphone input with anMP3 audio file in real time.
Faced with the increasing popularity ofNapster, Scour developed a competing peer-to-peer service named Scour Exchange.[3] Unlike Napster, the Scour software supported video and images in addition to just audio files, and integrated all users into one network. The company also tied its web site promotional materials to the Scour Exchange software and attempted to leverage its web and SMB indexes in providing additional search results inside the Scour Exchange application.
In the summer of 2000 theMotion Picture Association of America, theRecording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and theNational Music Publishers Association (NMPA) brought a lawsuit against Scour, alleging copyright infringement.[4] Despite Scour's declarations of innocence, the company was not able to raise money to continue operations. They laid off most of its staff in September of that year and filed for bankruptcy protection, to protect the company from the lawsuit, shortly afterwards.[5] The company's assets went up for auction and, following a bidding war, all assets were purchased byCenterspan Communications ofPortland, Oregon in late December of that year.[6]
Scour has since relaunched in early 2008 as ametasearch engine combining the three most used search engines—Google,Yahoo! andLive Search—into a singleaggregated search page withsocial concepts. Scour rewards users with a point for each unique search conducted through the Scour Toolbar or at the website, as well as for commenting or rating a result (to a maximum of three points per search). Points can also be acquired through use of itsaffiliate program, with a matching 25% commission given to the host of the referral. Once users have accumulated a certain number of points they can be redeemed for aVisagift card orPayPalmoney transfer[7] at an impliedexchange rate of approximatelyUSD$0.004 (2⁄5¢) a point. The rate for those not in its targetdemographic, however, is significantly less—onlyUSD$0.0001 per point.[8] The program was cancelled in the summer of 2009.
Since as early as 2009 a web browsing virus related to Scour surfaced.[9] This virus hijacks the web browser being used and automatically redirects the user to Scour's search engine. Other websites have been reported to be redirected to as well with Scour being the primary one. The user's browser is redirected to scour.com after clicking a link, usually from Google.[10]