Feeds

Scour sources content for you automatically. Follow specific feeds only when you want more control over where it comes from.

You don't need to follow feeds

By default, Scour searches for content matching your interests across 28,348 community-contributed sources (107 added this week).

Adding a feed that isn't on Scour yet makes it available to everyone; following one that's already here just puts it in your feed. There are no private feeds yet.

Why follow feeds?

Following gives you more control:

• Focus your sources: Your default view switches to only show content from followed feeds, while your interests still filter what you see within those sources.
• Prioritize specific authors: Following ensures their posts are considered for your feed.
• Get feed recommendations: Scour can recommend similar sources you might have missed.

How Scour handles multiple sources

When the same article appears in multiple feeds, Scour shows it once and combines the sources. You won't see duplicate entries cluttering your results.

Scour also balances content across sources, so a feed posting dozens of articles a day won't drown out a blog that posts monthly. See How ranking works for how.

The Sources filter

The sources dropdown above your feed controls which sources Scour searches:

• Feeds you follow: Only content from feeds you follow
• All sources: Search all 28,348 sources on Scour

Without any feeds followed, this filter does not appear and Scour searches everything. Once you follow a feed, "Feeds you follow" becomes the default. Use "Save as default" to change this.

Discovering feeds from posts

When you find an interesting post, you can see which feeds carry it and follow with one click. Select the post, open its ⋯ menu, and tap "Feeds."

Here's an example. Notice the "Discussed on …" line that appears when an article has a conversation on a site like Hacker News, Reddit, or Lobsters. The card shows one venue; select the post to see the rest:

Finding and adding feeds

You can browse feeds directly:

• Popular feeds (most followers on Scour)
• Newest feeds (recently added to Scour)

The Sort menu on that tab has more ways in: Most frequent, Recently active, Name A-Z, and, when you're signed in, Followed first and Unfollowed first.

To add feeds manually, go to your Feeds page and paste URLs (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, or website URLs). You can enter multiple URLs at once. For migrating from another reader, import an OPML file. See For RSS users for details. When you import an OPML file, Scour also suggests interests based on the feeds you follow.

You can follow three kinds of sources:

• Feeds: a site's RSS, Atom, or JSON feed. You get the posts it publishes.
• Sites: everything Scour finds from one website. This helps when a site has no feed, or spreads its posts across many. Click the site name under a post to open its page, then press Follow.
• People: posts by one author, either on one site or on every site where Scour finds their name. Bylines come from each site, so Scour can't confirm that the same name on different sites is the same person. Press Follow beside the byline on an expanded post. Or click the byline to see what Scour has found under that name.

Feed recommendations & management

Once you have interests and followed feeds, Scour recommends the sources that most consistently match your interests, rather than the ones that simply publish the most. Mirrors and aggregators that relay other sites' posts are left out. You'll find these leading the Feeds tab of your Discover page, with new suggestions also woven into your feed as you read.

Here's an example of a popular feed:

• Follow to add it to your feeds
• Not interested to improve future recommendations

Your Feeds page shows all the feeds you follow with recent posts. A search box and a Sort menu (Newest added, Oldest added, Name A-Z) sit above the list. From there you can search, unfollow, or export as OPML.

Bookmarklet

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar:

When you're on any page with a feed (blog, news site, podcast), click the bookmarklet to open Scour's Feeds page with the URL pre-filled.

Still have questions? Or feedback on these docs? Please let me know!