Getting Started with Scour
Scour is a personalized content discovery platform. You say what topics you're interested in and it scours thousands of sources to find great articles and blog posts for you.
How It Works
Scour is built on two core concepts:
- Interests determine what content you see. Add topics you care about, and Scour uses semantic matching to find relevant articles.
- Feeds determine where that content comes from. By default, Scour searches all sources. You can optionally subscribe to specific feeds to narrow your sources.
Most users start with just interests. You don't need to subscribe to any feeds to get started. Scour will search across all of the 16499 community-contributed sources (48 more were added this week) for content that matches your interests.
If you're curious about the technical details, see how Scour ranks content.
Creating Your Account
When you sign up, you'll add three interests before creating your account. Interests are free-form text: you can write anything you want. There's no predefined list of topics to choose from.
Here are some examples of what other users are interested in:
Don't overthink your first three. You can add as many as you want later. Interests can be as broad or specific as you like:
- Broad: "AI" will surface content about machine learning, LLMs, robotics, and more
- Specific: "Rust async runtime internals" will find exactly that
- Niche: "Fermentation", "Urban Sketching", "Mechanical Keyboards". If people write about it, Scour can find it
Scour automatically diversifies your feed to avoid showing all content related to one topic. If you have interests in both AI and cooking, you'll see a mix.
Your Personalized Feed
After signing up, you'll land on your feed at scour.ing/@yourusername. This is your personalized view of the web, filtered to match what you care about.
The default Fresh view balances recency with relevance. You can change the timeframe using the filter menu.
More Options
If you want to limit your feed to specific sources, you can subscribe to feeds. You can also block domains or filter out paywalled content.
Using Scour on Mobile
For the best mobile experience, add Scour to your home screen.
Scour is a Progressive Web App (PWA): you install it directly from your browser, not through an app store. When you first visit on mobile, you'll see an install prompt at the bottom of the screen. Or follow these instructions:
On iPhone or iPad
- Open scour.ing in Safari
- Tap the Share button
- Tap Add to Home Screen
On Android
- Open scour.ing in Chrome
- Tap the menu
- Tap Add to Home screen or Install app