Hi friends,
In August, Scour scoured 878,974 articles from 28,519 feeds. Also, 219 users signed up since my last product update email at the end of June so welcome to you all!
If you've been enjoying Scour and would be willing to put a quote on the testimonials section of the home page, please let me know!
Here's what's new in the product from July and August:
I've spent a lot of the past 2 months working on improving ranking quality. Now, the interests and sources you tend to click on and like get boosted while those that you tend to ignore or dislike are deprioritized. Additionally, Scour got a notch better at matching posts to your interests, so you should see less off-topic content.
By the way: liking and disliking items you read on Scour helps make your feed better and also helps me figure out what types of ranking changes to prioritize.
Scour now detects groups of articles covering the same event, including across days and even when they don't all link to a common source. You should now see less repeat coverage of the same major news stories across days.
Scour is better at detecting and hiding ads, deals, press releases, sponsored placements, listicles, and posts with little substantive content. Also, arXiv papers that have been withdrawn by their authors won't show up in your feed.
I got a little excited after adding some of the features in June and the feed got a little too busy. Now, the feed has been cleaned up again.
While scanning the feed, you'll see just the information you need to decide whether to click on it. You can tap any row to see additional information including a preview snippet from the post and other articles that cover it or that it links to. Plus, after you love, like, or dislike a post, you'll see additional options for seeing more or less content like that in your feed.
Under each post's title, you'll see the estimated reading time, as long as Scour was able to fetch enough of the article's content to determine the length.
Adding new interests got easier. You can write any free-form text you want. While you're typing, you'll see "quick add" suggestions based on topics other users have added. Or, when you click Add Interests, Scour will extract appropriate topics from whatever you have written.
If you run out of posts from feeds you subscribe to within the given time window, your feed will now continue automatically to show you slightly older posts and then posts from across all of Scour.
Here were some of my favorite articles I found on Scour in July and August:
/explain-diff skill that I tried out for a few days and then turned off.Happy Scouring!
- Evan