Is Scour a Scam?
The question was asked “Is Scour a scam or not”.
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One major concern was that some people read on the Scour blog about users not being paid or their accounts had been deleted before they could get any payment.
If you do not know what Scour is, go to http://scour.com
Scour is a clever search engine which collects the search results from the three major search engines and present the searcher with those results. Scour also pays their clients to do searches. They also pay you to vote for results and invite your friends.
I found the result very handy. I tend to always use Google to do a search. When I tested Scour I saw how many relevant searches I lost out on which was listed top on Yahoo and not on Google at all. What I also like is the fact that it only shows the first 2 or 3 pages of results and not 200,000 pages of results like most search engines.
As far as a search engine is concerned I think it is a good idea.
What about business?
First of all it does not cost you anything and I think I can easily rather use scour to search in future than Google as it is more accurate and clean.
But to make money with? Well unfortunately like with most programs the smaller countries get left behind again.
On their site it says:
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
So you will have to do about 50,000 searches just to earn $5.00 . If you are not part of the big countries you can confirm this by going to http://scour.com , register, do a couple of searches and then in your “profile” click on “redeem points”.
The only way you can earn something is by inviting many more people to join Scour. You will then also earn 25% on the points they earn.
If you are part of the big countries listed above you can earn $25.00 for doing 6,500 searches, that is about 17 per day for a whole year.
What about the scam part?
I would not know until I reached a pay-out level. I did read their blog and I did not find many reports of payout problems. I would think that if it was a real big scam and they have millions of clients that the internet and their blog would be full of complaints. They have a Alexa ranking of 12,225 which shows me that this is a real busy site. So if they were a scam we would have seen more reports on it.
You must keep in mind that with a program like this some people always come up with methods to cheat the system. The build programs which will automatically search and vote so that they can earn points for doing nothing. Although this have not been confirmed I would guess that this could be the problem.
If you search the Internet for complaints about Google Adsense you will also see complaints of people who have been suspended and they “have no clue why”. You always get people who try to manipulate and cheat the system because they are lazy.
Conclusion
- I do not think that Scour is a scam and I would not know until I reach my first payout.
- As far as money earning is concerned I think you will spend a lot of time searching in order to make big money but while you do have to search for something each day you might as well use Scour instead of the others. Only down side is that it is sometimes much slower than the normal search engines (from my PC with 3G)
You can join Scour at http://scour.com
Proof that Scour pays:
http://paidopps.blogspot.com/2009/06/scourcom-proof-of-payment-screenshot.html
Scour is not a scam, I got paid just a few days after requesting cashout.