Scour - April Update
Hi friends,
In April, Scour scoured 778,059 posts from 25,790 feeds. This month, my focus was on ranking improvements and adding a number of new features:
π Ranking Improvements
Scour is designed to find hidden gems that interest you, while trying to avoid using popularity signals or pigeonholing you into a narrow slice of content simply because you clicked on one thing (you can read the ranking philosophy here).
Your Scour feed now subtly adjusts based on which content you click on, like, or dislike. Interests whose related content you like will get a small boost, as well as posts from domains that you tend to like. This effect is intentionally subtle.
The feed is also much better now at balancing across your different interests. I revamped the way it does the final content selection to have an explicit diversification step that balances the feed based on your interests, the sources, and other criteria.
βοΈ Tap to Expand
Scour's interface has undergone a number of iterations this month. Now, you click or tap a post to expand it. The expanded view contains a short snippet from the post with a link to read more, as well as buttons to save, react, report it, etc.
π Saved Posts
Want to save an item to read for later? You can now save items, which is separate from liking them. Saved items are private and don't affect your feed's ranking at all. Also, Scour will occasionally resurface a couple of your saved items while you're browsing your feed so you can revisit things you might not have had time to read before.
π Reading Posts on Scour
You can read post summaries and some entire posts directly on Scour. Click on Read More, which is shown when you click on a post, to go to the post preview page. That page has better styling now, so it should be nicer to read. Plus, code blocks now get automatic syntax highlighting.
π± Browse Interests by Category
You can now browse popular interests by category. Technology is broken out into subcategories, or you can easily skip past it to find other topics like Science & Nature, Food & Cooking, Arts & Design, etc.
π Post List by Domain
Clicking on a post's domain now brings you to a chronological list of all the posts from that site and, optionally, all the subdomains. You can easily block domains on that page if you don't want any of their content appearing in your feed, or just browse to see what else was published.
π’ Pagination by Default
The default feed view switched from infinite scrolling to paginated. You can click the link at the bottom of the page to use infinite scroll, or toggle this in your settings.
π Thanks
Thanks to Gordon McLean for the Scour mention in Why I Still Like the Internet!
And thanks to everyone whose feedback shaped the roadmap this month:
- Thanks to Qiang Huang for requesting an easier way to see the post preview!
- Thanks to Shane Sveller for lots of UI feedback and requesting the ability to block multiple subdomains!
- Thanks to Phil Eaton and Gordon McLean for pointing out that the footer was impossible to reach (it's now hidden completely when infinite scroll is enabled)! Thanks also to Phil for asking to see all posts from a domain!
- Thanks to u/goma_goma for suggesting adding Saved Posts!
- Thanks to Adam Benenson and Patrick WadstrΓΆm for the feedback that led to the categorized interests view!
π Some of My Favorite Posts
Here were some of my favorite posts that I found on Scour in April:
- TurboPuffer wrote an interesting blog post about efficiently merging recency and other numeric signals into lexical (BM25) scores for documents. I'm currently working on adding lexical scoring to Scour, so this was very timely for me: Mixing numeric attributes into text search for better first-stage relevance.
- On the topic of search, Doug Turnbull had a good post discussing Can agents replace the search stack? and Daniel Tunkelang wrote about using multiple documents to represent a search query in Distilling Retrieval Pipelines to a Single Embedding Model. I'm not switching Scour's architecture to either of these just yet, but they're interesting food for thought.
- I uninstalled Ollama, the tool for running local LLMs, after reading: Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama.
- This is a gem of a comment and historical tidbit in the SQLite source code that Avinash Sajjanshetty found while working on the Turso rewrite: SQLite prefixes its temp files with
etilqs_. - On the non-software front, this article makes an unfortunately compelling point: Iran didnβt have a nuclear weapon before this war. But you can see why it would develop one now.
For Rust developers, I also wrote up this blog post: Your Clippy Config Should Be Stricter.
Have ideas for how to make Scour better? Post them on the feedback board!
Happy Scouring!
- Evan