Scour Inc.
|
Type of site
|
Web search engine |
|---|---|
| Website | www.Scour.com at the Wayback Machine (archived February 29, 2000) |
| Launched | November 3, 1997 |
| Current status | Closed |
Scour Inc. was a multimedia Internet search engine, and provided Scour Exchange, an early peer-to-peer file exchange service.
Scour was founded by five students (Vince Busam, Michael Todd, Dan Rodrigues, Jason Droege and Kevin Smilak) from the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in December 1997. By mid-1998 Ilya Haykinson and Travis Kalanick, also Computer Science students at UCLA joined the founding team. It moved into the spotlight a year later when in June 1998, Scour received its first investment from former Disney president Michael Ovitz and Ron Burkle of Yucaipa companies.
The company's early products were an SMB search engine and Scour Media Agent, a Windows application to download files from SMB shares. The search engine would probe IP addresses for publicly shared files and then index them for download by other users.
In 1998, the company developed a web search engine as well, crawling the World Wide Web for links to multimedia audio, video and images.
In 1999 Scour received an investment from Michael Ovitz and the Yucaipa Company, an investment arm of the billionaire Ronald Burkle. Together, the total investment represented a controlling share in the company. After the investment, Scour expanded in terms of product offerings and personnel. The company launched a software product named MyCaster which allowed users to stream audio over the network, optionally mixing microphone input with an MP3 audio file in real time.
Faced with the increasing popularity of Napster, Scour developed a competing peer-to-peer service named Scour Exchange. Unlike Napster, the Scour software supported video and images in addition to just audio files, and integrated all users into one network. The company also tied its web site promotional materials to the Scour Exchange software and attempted to leverage its web and SMB indexes in providing additional search results inside the Scour Exchange application.
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