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 and keyword matching to find relevant articles.
Feeds determine where that content comes from. By default, Scour searches all sources. You can optionally follow specific feeds to narrow your sources.

Most users start with interests alone. You don't need to follow any feeds to get started. Scour will search across all of the 28,939 community-contributed sources (82 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

There are two ways to sign up:

Describe your interests — Write a sentence or two about what topics you care about. Scour extracts specific interests from your description.
Import an OPML file — If you already use an RSS reader, upload your OPML export. Scour imports your feeds and infers interests from them, so you get everything set up in one step.

Either way, you'll review the generated interests before finishing signup. Interests are free-form text: there's no predefined list of topics to choose from.

Here are some examples of what other users are interested in:

AI Startups Self-Hosting Cooking Geopolitics Productivity Algorithms Video Games

Don't overthink your initial interests. You can add as many as you want later, and they can be as broad as "AI" or as specific as "Rust async runtime internals." See Interests for how to pitch them.

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. Change the timeframe with the first dropdown above your feed.

More options

If you want to limit your feed to specific sources, you can follow feeds. You can also block domains or filter out paywalled content.

On your phone, tablet, or computer, you can install Scour as an app for a faster, full-screen experience with a home-screen icon.

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