Doha • Would you like to receive points for searching a topic on a website? If yes, Internet users can check out Scour.com, a meta social search engine that gives results from Google, Yahoo and MSN. It's a user-friendly website that wins points for surfers who use their search engine.

Many residents here are switching over to Scour.com from the commonly used search websites.

"Scour.com is definitely more rewarding," said Noureen, an Administrative Assistant with a local company who has signed up with Scour.com. "It is more relevant since it gives more options to a visitor's query and it's fast."

Scour is different from other social search, ratings and community sites since it lets users vote and comment on search results, provides superior privacy control, gives weight to preferred engines and lets people exchange search points for Visa gift cards.

"Scour gives people a different way to search by combining the best search results available on the web with a way to benefit from the previous work, and the feedback of millions of searchers," said Daniel Yomtobian, president and CEO of Scour. "The concept is not new, but we believe we can bring the elements together better than some of the other engines have to date."

People can earn points through a combination of actions such as Searching (one point), voting (two points), commenting (three points) and finally if a person refers the site to a friend, he/she will earn two points.

According to the Scour website, once a member aggregates at least 6,500 points, they can redeem them for a $25 Visa gift card. So, if members invite 25 friends that used Scour regularly in addition to themselves, that's an easy $125 in their pocket for a year of what they already do.

"We're not trying to provide users with an alternative income," said Yomtobian. "The Scour points programme is a way for Scour to reward the user for helping build the community to refine search results beyond what the algorithms say."

However, there are many who are used to sites like Google. "Even though most researchers would switch to 'Scour.com' because of its development, others will stick to their commonly used search engine," said Y V Murthy, a Business Development Manager at ABA Technology Solutions.