Built by Evan

👋 Hi, I'm Evan Schwartz. I created Scour and work on it full-time.

For my full bio and other projects, you can check out my personal website at: emschwartz.me.

Why I Built Scour

I like reading Hacker News to keep up with what's going on in tech. The problem is that too much content gets submitted. If you've ever tried submitting something to HN, you might be aware of the tricks and hoops people try to jump through to get their content noticed.

I thought that there are probably a lot of great articles that get submitted to HN but never get noticed, simply because of the social aspect of the algorithm and the randomness of whether people are looking at the Newest page when something is posted. This is a problem that exists across all social aggregators. I wanted a tool that could watch a noisy feed like the HN Newest fire hose and pick out articles related to my interests.

After building a little prototype with a text file of my interests and an open source embedding model, I pointed it at HN Newest and immediately started finding great stuff. I found tons of posts that had 1-2 points and were never going to reach the front page. But they were things I was super interested in reading.

That prototype evolved into Scour.

What I Care About

Scour is built on a few principles that matter to me:

• Discovery over popularity — The best content for you isn't necessarily what's popular with everyone else.
• Relevance without pigeonholing — Recommendation systems today are so focused on finding content you'll engage with that you end up swamped with very similar content as soon as you engage with one thing. I want Scour to find content that is relevant to your interests without trapping you in little topic holes.
• Balancing control and ease of use — I want you to have control over what type of content shows up in your feed. And, I also want it to be easy to find relevant content without too much setup or fiddling.
• Indie Software — I appreciate well-made pieces of software built by solo developers or small teams that provide clear value for a fair price. I was inspired to build Scour as a solo project by the approach and writing of Herman, the developer of Bearblog.

For more on the philosophy behind Scour's design, see How Ranking Works

Also, Scour is currently completely free to use. I am planning to add additional premium features (not ads). You can read more about these features and my pricing philosophy on the Pricing page.

Follow Along

• My Scour feed — See what I'm reading.
• My likes — Posts I've loved and liked.
• My Blog — Technical deep-dives and updates as I work on Scour.

Get in Touch

Have feedback, feature requests, or just want to say hi?

• Feedback board — Vote on features and report issues
• evan@scour.ing — Direct email

Let me know if you would be open to discussing Scour on a short call with me, or answering some questions about it over email. I love hearing feedback from people who use Scour, and it helps me prioritize new features and improvements.