Scour was founded by five students (Vince Busam, Michael Todd, Dan Rodrigues, Jason Droege and Kevin Smilak) from the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in December 1997.
By mid-1998 Ilya Haykinson and Travis Kalanick, also Computer Science students at UCLA joined the founding team.
It moved into the spotlight a year later when in June 1998, Scour received its first investment from former Disney president Michael Ovitz and Ron Burkle of Yucaipa companies.
The search engine would probe IP addresses for publicly shared files and then index them for download by other users.
[3] Unlike Napster, the Scour software supported video and images in addition to just audio files, and integrated all users into one network.
[9] This virus hijacks the web browser being used and automatically redirects the user to Scour's search engine.