How ranking works

The philosophy: hidden gems over viral content

Scour deliberately avoids using popularity signals. There's no consideration of how many shares a post has, how many backlinks point to it, or how much engagement it's getting elsewhere. Instead, ranking is based on:

• Your explicit interests — topics you've told Scour you care about
• Your own reading — which of those interests you actually open, and which sources you keep coming back to. Only your activity on Scour, never anyone else's.
• Content quality — a domain blocklist filters out known spam, content farms, and SEO-heavy sites
• Source diversity — ensuring no single topic or source dominates your feed

One nuance: a story the feeds you follow link to can become eligible to appear, but those citations never change its score.

Explicit interests, no pigeonholing

Your feed is determined by the interests you explicitly add. One click on a random article won't add a topic: if you want more cooking content, you add a cooking interest. What your reading does change is the balance among the interests you already chose. The ones you keep opening move up; the ones you skip drift down.

How interest matching works

Scour matches an article against an interest both by the words and phrases it uses and by meaning, so "Rust" the programming language doesn't pull in the Rust Belt. Each article is scored by its best matching interest, with a small bump when it also matches other, distinct interests you've added. See Interests for how to tune the balance.

Timeframe & recency

The timeframe dropdown above your feed affects how recency factors into ranking:

• Fresh — Prioritizes recent content while ensuring your feed spans multiple time periods. Ranking is still based on relevance to your interests, but selection is balanced across recency buckets so you see a spread of new and recent posts. This is the default.
• Past hour, Today, This week, This month — Show content from that time period ranked purely by relevance.

Rankings are computed in real-time on each page load, not precomputed. This means changes to your interests or filter settings take effect instantly.

Quality filtering

Before ranking, Scour filters out content from low-quality sources. A domain blocklist of 2,702,356 domains removes known spam, content farms, and SEO-heavy sites.

Additionally, articles with listicle-style titles ("5 Ways to...", "Top 10...") and titles that lead with attention-grabbing emojis are filtered out before ranking. Those articles are tempting to click on, but often contain particularly unsatisfying content.

For more on filtering options you control, see Content filtering.

Source discovery within your interests

Discovery on Scour means finding new voices on topics you already care about, not being pushed toward new topics. That's why source diversity is a core ranking factor, and why new or obscure sources aren't disadvantaged against established ones. In practice:

• You won't see five articles from the same source in a row
• If you have ten interests, your feed will reflect a mix, not only your most active topic
• When multiple outlets cover the same story, you see it once

Feeds you follow get one more protection. A blog that publishes twice a month can lose every slot to a wire service that publishes twice an hour, so each page reserves a slot for a followed feed that hasn't surfaced anything to you yet. The reserved post still has to be relevant to your interests: if nothing from those feeds clears the bar, the slot goes back to the regular ranking.

How reactions shape your feed

Reactions subtly adjust the mix within the interests you've already added:

• Source prominence: Likes and loves on a source's content make that source more likely to show up. Consistent dislikes or flags make a source less prominent.
• Topic balance: Among the interests you've added, the ones you consistently open move up and the ones you skip drift down. This shifts the mix toward what you actually read; it never removes an interest.
• Interest suggestions: Reactions feed into the interest recommendation system, which suggests new topics you might want to add. Suggestions are only suggestions.

These effects are designed to be gradual. A single reaction won't dramatically shift your feed. Adjustments are confidence-weighted (based on how much content you've seen from a source), capped so no source dominates, and decay over time. The goal is to show you more of what you enjoy without pigeonholing you.

Try it: why didn't I see this?

If an article you expected didn't show up in your feed, Scour can explain what happened: whether the source isn't in your feeds, the article was filtered, or it ranked below your current page. Paste the article URL here or on the "Why didn't I see this?" page.

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