Evan Schwartz

Scour - March Update

Hi friends,

In March, Scour scoured 813,588 posts from 24,029 feeds (7,131 were newly added) and 488 new users signed up. Welcome!

Here's what's new in the product:

šŸ”ƒ Feed Diversity Overhaul

Scour now does a better job of ensuring that your feed draws from a mix of sources and that no single interest or group of interests dominates. I had made a number of changes along these lines in the past, but they were fiddly and the diversification mechanism wasn't working that well. Under the hood, Scour now does a first pass to score how similar articles are to your interests and then has a separate step for selecting posts for your feed while keeping it diverse on a number of different dimensions.

šŸ„° More of What You Like

Content from websites and groups of interests you tend to like and/or click on more are now given slightly more room in your feed. Conversely, websites and groups of interests you tend to dislike or not click on will be given a bit less space.

For Scour, I'm always trying to think of how to show you more content you'll find interesting -- without trapping you in a small filter bubble (you can read about my ranking philosophy in the docs). After a number of iterations, I landed on a design that I'm happy with. I hope this strikes a good balance between making sure you see articles from your favorite sources, while still leaving room for the serendipity of finding a great new source that you didn't know existed.

ā¤ļø Inline Reactions

After you click an article, Scour now explicitly asks you for your reaction. These reactions help tune your feed slightly, and they help me improve the ranking algorithm over time. Before, the reaction buttons were below every post but that made them a bit hard to hit intentionally and easy to touch accidentally. If you want to react to an article without reading it first, you can also find them in the More Options (...) menu.

Thanks to Shane Sveller for pointing out that the reaction buttons were too small on mobile!

šŸŽÆ Exact Keyword Matching

Scour now supports exact keyword matching, in addition to using vector embeddings for semantic similarity. Articles that are similar to one of your interests but don't use the exact words or phrases from your interest definition will be ranked lower. Right now this applies to interests marked as "Specific" or "Normal" (this is also automatically determined when interests are created). This should cut down on the number of articles you see that are mis-categorized or clearly off-topic.

Thanks to Alex Miller and an anonymous user for prompting this, and thanks to Alex, JackJackson, mhsid, snuggles, and anders_no for all the Off-Topic reports!

ā‰ļø Why Didn't This Appear?

Sometimes, I see an article on Hacker News or elsewhere and wonder why didn't this show up in my Scour feed. You can now paste links into the Why didn't I see this? page, and it will give you a bit of an explanation. You can also report that so I can look into it more and continue to improve the ranking algorithm over time.

šŸ”– Some of My Favorite Posts

Here were some of my favorite posts that I found on Scour in March:

Happy Scouring!

- Evan

P.S. If you use a coding agent like Claude Code, I also wrote up A Rave Review of Superpowers, a plugin that makes me much more productive.

#scour