Yet another search engine launches

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Forget Google. These days, you can search for things on the Web and get paid, give money to charity or even type in your query under a giant picture of the band KISS. The boomlet of new search engines (just Google ‘search engine,’ you’ll find them) got a new addition today with Scour, a LA company that calls itself “the best of algorithmic and human powered search.”

Scour awards points when you search, vote or comment on its site. Points add up to dollars on a Visa gift card. Sound familiar? It’s not the first LA company to launch this year promising to do the same thing -- Swagbucks.com, a portal launched in March by Los Angeles’ Prodege, awards points (which translate to cash) for searching.

Here are a few of the other search engines out there: there’s Ecosearch.org, a nonprofit that donates ad revenue from searches to environmental organizations; Redzee, an engine that shows results as images of websites rather than URLs; Dogpile, which calls itself ‘all the best search engines piled into one;’ and Mahalo, an LA human-powered search engine founded by everyone’s favorite Internet entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis.

There are local search engines, semantic search engines, visual search engines, search engines with celebrity URLs, event search engines and even search engines for media professionals interested in online advertising.

Scour is different, said founder Daniel Yomtobian. ‘We make it as easy as Google, but you actually get something for it,’ he said. The site has 6,000 active users now, and Yomtobian hopes to get 1% of the search market share, or 2.5 million unique users by the end of the year.

Will Scour or any of these other small search engines break us of our Google habit? Probably not, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at research and consulting firm Sterling Market Intelligence.

‘There have been lots and lots of efforts to get people to change their behavior,’ he said. ‘They just haven’t been successful by and large.’

Search engines make money from advertising -- the more searches they handle, the more money they make. But most people don’t use anything but Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Of course, Sterling said, people often say they’re dissatisfied with searches and might welcome better search options. A Kelton Research study says that three out of four consumers leave their computers without finding what they’re looking for. Maybe a search engine will come along and give us relevant results in a way we didn’t even know we needed. It’s hard to imagine Google will still be the dominant search engine in 10 years, Sterling said.

It’s also hard to imagine Google not being the King of Search -- especially when Scour doesn’t even show up on the front page of a Google search with the term ‘Scour.com.’

-- Alana Semuels