Scour Unplugs Its Search Engine Tool Amid Controversy Over Privacy Issue

Scour Inc. announced late Friday that it has stopped a controversial Internet search engine tool that enabled outsiders to peek at digital entertainment files in personal computers, sometimes without the owner’s knowledge.

The move came on the same day a story in The Times detailed the practice. Scour officials said earlier this week that the Beverly Hills multimedia firm, partly backed by Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz, had planned to phase out the information-gathering technique by next month. The company had said it was not as effective as its newer search tools.

But the company moved up the timetable because “of the unnecessary controversy resulting from the [Times’] article,” Scour officials said in a prepared statement.

At the heart of the issue was where Scour’s search engine looked for digital music, videos and photographs on the Net--and how it got that information.

Like traditional Web search engines, Scour’s engine uses robotic software agents, known as “bots” or “spiders,” to crawl about the Internet and scoop up information. Scour’s bots search Web sites and public download sites, which are electronic storage spots where people house data.

Until Friday evening, Scour also sent bots to scan for multimedia files stored on any machine that had activated the public file-sharing option and used a computer protocol called Server Message Block, or SMB. The protocol is a little-known but crucial standard that allows one machine to connect--and communicate--with another.

Though company officials said the practice was legal, technology experts described the SMB search protocol as crossing the line between what is truly public and what some computer users had inadvertently exposed.

On the Internet, innovations are sometimes greeted with enthusiasm for their technical prowess while others are accused of being too invasive.

In the case of Scour, security experts say that unless many Internet users took security precautions, they could let anyone--including Scour’s bots--look for files inside parts of their PC. Because there are dozens of ways to network machines together, it also is easy for consumers to forget about their own digital security.

But Scour officials disagreed.

“Scour has always considered online privacy a top priority,” the company stated. “Scour technology only searches files that people explicitly indicate they want to share with the public, and Scour has always provided users a way to request that their files not be included in Scour searches using common Internet search engine conventions.”

Scour’s search engine can be used by anyone who visits the company’s Web site or accesses the engine via its file-sharing software program, Scour Exchange.

This week, Scour officials described the search technique as a “clumsy, error-prone way to do file-sharing,” and noted that links to files found this way work only about 20% of the time.

The Scour bots can be blocked by security programs, known as firewalls, or other automated instructions that prevent the bots from looking. If a person turns off a PC or moves the multimedia files to a different folder on the hard drive, the link to the stored music or video files can be blocked.