Type of site Realtime search Website surchur.com Launched May 2008 | Available in English Alexa rank 3,170,814 (April 2014) Current status defunct | |
Surchur (pronounced sûrchûr – "searcher") was a realtime discovery and search engine launched on May 1, 2008. Surchur, located in Carnation, Washington, was privately held and self-funded.
Functionality
Surchur, the "dashboard to right now", had two core features: discovery and search.
The realtime search engine used proprietary algorithms based on Twitter mentions, Facebook shares, diggs and votes by its users to normalize results and rank web pages popular in real time. The results were organized in tabs based on their source: "popular" items were web pages most followed/voted by users, "blogs" were items pulled from the blogosphere, "social web" included diggs and tweets, "pictures" pulled from flickr and photobucket, "videos" from YouTube and Truveo, and "products" from Amazon.com and eBay. Surchur was used by some as an internet reputation management tool.
The homepage displayed the Real Time Board, an algorithmically determined and ranked list of the most popular topics on the web. The list was based on popular terms from search engines, news sites and social media and the ranking is based on the popularity across Surchur itself, the blogosphere and total tweets with the velocity of the popularity playing a crucial role.
Since August 2012, the service has been "indefinitely paused".