Evan Schwartz

Scour - January Update

Hi friends,

In January, Scour scoured 805,241 posts from 16,555 feeds (939 were newly added).

I also rolled out a lot of new features that I'm excited to tell you about. Maybe because of some of these, I found more posts than usual that I thought were especially worth sharing. You can find them at the bottom of this post. Let's dive in!

The Scour homepage has been completely revamped. It includes a new tagline, a more succinct description, and a live demo where you can try out my feed right from that page. Let me know what you think!

Scour also finally has its own logo! (And it looks great on my phone's home screen, if I do say so myself! See below)

šŸ“— Interactive Documentation

Have you ever wondered how Scour works? There is now a full documentation section, complete with detailed write-ups about Interests, Feeds, Reactions, How Ranking Works, and more.

There are also guides specifically for RSS users and readers of Hacker News, arXiv, Reddit, and Substack.

All of the docs have lots of interactive elements, which I wrote about in Building Docs Like a Product. My favorite one is on the Hacker News guide where you can search for hidden gems that have been submitted to HN but that have not reached the front page.

Thanks to Tiago Ferreira, Andrew Doran, and everyone else who gave me the feedback that they wanted to understand more about how Scour works!

šŸ“± App

Scour is now a Progressive Web App (PWA). That means you can install it as an icon on your home screen and access it easily. Just open Scour on your phone and follow the instructions there.

Thanks to Adam Benenson for the encouragement to finally do this!

šŸ™ˆ Hiding Seen Items

This is one of the features I have most wanted as a user of Scour myself. When you're browsing the feed, Scour now keeps track of which items you've seen and scrolled past so it shows you new content each time you check it.

If you don't want this behavior, you can disable it in the feed filter menu or change your default view to show seen posts.

šŸ”Ž Feed Autodiscovery

If you subscribe to specific feeds, as opposed to scouring all of them, it's now easier to find the feed for an article you liked.

Click the "..." menu under the post, then "Show Feeds" to show feeds where the item was found. When populating that list, Scour will now automatically search the website where the article was found to see if it has a feed that Scour wasn't already checking. This makes it easy to discover new feeds and follow websites or authors whose content you like.

This was another feature I've wanted for a long time myself. Previously, when I liked an article, I'd copy the domain and try to add it to my feeds on the Feeds page. Now, Scour does that with the click of a button.

šŸ”¢ Penalizing Listicles

Some of the most disliked and flagged articles on Scour had titles such as "The Top 10..." or "5 tricks...". Scour now automatically penalizes articles with titles like those.

Because I'm explicitly trying to avoid using popularity in ranking, I need to find other ways to boost high-quality content and down-rank low-quality content. You can expect more of these types of changes in the future to increase the overall quality of what you see in your feed.

Previously, posts found through Google News links would show Google News as the domain under the post. Now, Scour extracts the original link.

āŒØļø Keyboard Shortcuts

You can now navigate your feed using just your keyboard. Type ? to get the list of available keyboard shortcuts.

šŸ”– Some of My Favorite Posts

Finally, here are some of my favorite posts that I found on Scour in January. There were a lot!

Happy Scouring!

- Evan

Have feedback for Scour? Post it on the feedback board and upvote others' suggestions to help me prioritize new features!

#scour