Last October, I wrote about AfterVote – a “social search engine.” AfterVote has been re-branded as “Scour.” It is a “meta” search engine, meaning that it simultaneously searches the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It still has Web 2.0 features like commenting and voting, and allows sorting results by search engine ranking.

Scour has apparently eliminated the ability to sort by “Diggs,” the voting unit of measure for stories submitted to Digg.com (see “Can You Digg It” for more on Digg.com). Also apparently gone is the setting page, which allows the user to set the weight of search results from the three major search engines. In exchange for losing those features, you gain a reward system. Registered Scour users can earn points for searching. They also earn points for searches performed by people they refer to Scour. Seems a little pyramid scheme-ish. Points are translated in to “cash” in the form of a Visa gift card. There is a handy calculator for projecting the amount of cash you can earn based on the number of searches and referrals.

This is interesting, I guess, but I am more intrigued by the visual search engine, called Searchme, which I wrote about here.

Robert Ambrogi has written more extensively about Search me, including the new “stacks” feature. Check that out here.

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