I’ve been using for sometimes now a new search engine called Scour. In fact it’s a metasearch engine combining the three most used search engines: Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN Search into a single aggregated search page with social concepts. With Scour, all three engines are searched all at once for you, with the results returned quickly on one page. The speed and quality of results are outstanding! In fact better then any of the 3 major engines alone. You need to try it.

Not only the results are great but 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. Points can also be acquired through use of its affiliate program, with a matching 25% commission given to the host of the referral. Once users have accumulated a certain amount of points they can be redeemed for a Visa gift card or PayPal money transfer. You get paid to search the web!

Scour sample search

Every Scour member is able to vote each listing up or down based on its relevance to their keyword as well as comment on their experiences with the site. It’s working to evolve search and deliver a much greater value to the User.

Also for the next 3 months, Scour is going to give away $1,000 to one lucky user each month. That’s right, 1 Scour user will receive $1,000 for searching on Scour. All you have to do is conduct your normal searches and Scour will award you with 1 Scour entry per search.

Posted: May 12th, 2009 by Kat Path
Filled Under: Blog Search, Must See Shit
With Tags: engine, google, metasearch engine, money, search engine, search engines, search the web, yahoo
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Any search result from Google started being flagged as malware with a message stating “This site may harm your computer”. Including Google’s own websites as you can see above.

Marissa Mayer has now explained the error on the Official Google Blog. She puts it down to human error after a ‘/’ was mistakenly put in an update sent from the non-profit StopBadware.org to Google (the non-profit also posted more details). The result was every URL in Google’s database being classified as “malware” until the stray ‘/’ was removed.

Here’s the official post from Mayer below:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

Posted: January 31st, 2009 by Kat Path
Filled Under: Fucking Tastic Stories, Laugh Your Ass Off, Must See Shit
With Tags: google, internet, malware, search result
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