Surf Canyon

Our last release, v3.0.5, was at the end of March, so it’s been a while since we put out a new version. We’re pleased to announce that v3.0.6 went out on June 30th and contains real-time featured results as well as support for Firefox’s private browsing mode.

On July 13th, Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon, will join Eli Goodman, comScore Search Evangelist, for a webinar discussion on the future of search and real-time personalization. To get an idea of the format, comScore offers a library of previous webinars. Here is a copy of the webinar invitation that comScore sent out this morning. We hope that you can attend.

Internet users have come to expect search experiences that deliver immediate and relevant results.  Are you ready to take the concept of personalized search to the next level?

Please join me for a webinar on Tuesday, July 13, 2010, 2 PM – 3PM EDT as comScore teams with Surf Canyon to discuss: The Future of Search: The Emerging Power of Real-time Personalized Search.

Register Now

We will explore how the fracturing of the search market and emerging technologies enable searches that are not only relevant but are dynamic, real-time, engagements.  After reviewing the current search landscape and the limitations of personalization today, our experts will demonstrate critical factors that will drive our future search experiences.

You will learn:

• What personalized search is, who does it now, and where current limitations lie
• Where personalized search is heading and how search engines can adapt
• How personalization will effect marketers and agencies, and how to prepare for it

I hope you’ll join me on July 13!

Cheers,
Eli Goodman
comScore Search Evangelist

[Update 7/28/2010] – comScore has now posted the slides and audio for anyone who missed the webinar and would like to check it out.

Our research, published by SIGIR in December ’09, has now been cited in an academic work for the first time. In a paper entitled “An Approach to the Customization of Web Search Results,” Professors Dr. Sérgio Roberto Pereira da Silva and Dra. Valéria Delisandra Freltrim from the Universidade Estadual de Maringá make several references to Surf Canyon. (Translations from Portuguese with the assistance of Google.)

“Results offered by search engines mix websites that are truly relevant to the context of the user with websites that have a marginal similarity to the query, or that are totally irrelevant… results offered by search engines, which tend to return many irrelevant websites, require the user to perform a manual filtering of results to obtain those that truly reflect his or her interest. The effort employed in this filtering may be high according to the classification accuracy of the results offered by the search engine (HARDTKE, 2009; BRUSILOVSKY, 2009; [B] MICARELLI, 2007; PANT, 2003).”

“According KHOPKAR (2003), search engines that have features to enable user interaction in order to construct a model of user interests have a higher level of complexity of interaction. This interaction can occur in two ways: implicit feedback, in which user actions are captured in a non-intrusive manner, or explicit feedback, which requires the user’s direct intervention… Software such as Surf Canyon (HARDTKE, 2009) uses both modes of interaction, however, lay users have difficulty interacting with additional features such as icons displayed at the end of each link enabling the approximation of similar websites…”

“Surf Canyon is an interactive IR system that dynamically modifies the query results using Web-based personalization… This software is an extension of the user’s browser and operates on various search engines. The personalization of Web query results offered by this tool comes from the combination of implicit and explicit feedback. The classification is based on a user model that infers the immediate interest of the user. Surf Canyon adds an icon at the end of each result offered by the search engine. When you visit the result or click on this icon, Surf Canyon recommends links similar in context to the one clicked (HARDTKE, 2009).”

“User actions that are considered to identify a positive interest in a website are:

• Length of stay on the document between 2 and 30 minutes;
• Action to Save the document on the computer;
• Action to Add the document in the browser favorites.

These choices are given considering the work of Goecks and Shavlik (1999), LIU (2006), [B] MICARELLI (2007) and MANNING (2008), HARDTKE (2009) and also a survey of users described in Chapter II… HARDTKE (2009) comments in his work that a user click on a hyperlink returned by a query already represents an interest in that website…”

“The development of this work meets the discussions exposed by BRUSILOVSKY (2009), HARDTKE(2009), MANNING (2008), [B] MICARELLI (2007), among others, regarding the need to reduce the effort of locating relevant content on the Web by adapting the results obtained from the search engines according to the interests of user.”

We’re flattered and humbled by the continued recognition of our work.

Back in June of 2008 Surf Canyon‘s browser extension was first listed by Mozilla as a “recommended” add-on. Yesterday we received similar treatment from the folks at Google Chrome who have added Surf Canyon to their list of “featured” extensions. We are thrilled and honored by the recognition!

Len Charnoff, video blogger and one of four Internet entrepreneurs selected by Microsoft to be featured in the television series “America At Work- Road Map To The Internet,” put together an excellent video demonstrating the functionality of Surf Canyon’s browser extension, which we have chosen to share with you. For best viewing, watch directly on Len’s blog or below using full-screen. Thank you, Len!

Real-time Search Personalization Tops Google, Yahoo! and Bing

OAKLAND, CALIF. March 9, 2010 – Surf Canyon, the popular developer of real-time search personalization, was selected by the About Web Search 2010 Reader’s Choice Awards as the “Best Search Engine.” The competition included the major search engines in additional to a number of start-ups.

Since April 2006, Surf Canyon has developed technology to improve the relevancy of organic and sponsored results through real-time re-ranking. By observing user actions as the search is being conducted, Surf Canyon is able to disambiguate intent “on the fly” in order to automatically “dig out” relevant results from as deep as page 100, as well as deliver more highly-targeted advertisements. Static search result pages are now effectively transformed into dynamic conversations.

“The real-time and implicit user actions that Surf Canyon uses to improve the searching and finding experience are cutting edge,” states Jim Jansen, Associate Professor at Penn State University. “It is great for finding those ‘deep’ but relevant results when conducting difficult or ambiguous queries.”

The technology is available with Surf Canyon’s own search engine, launched in July 2009 and available at http://www.SurfCanyon.com. It is additionally offered as a browser add-on for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome and has been downloaded over 1.5 million times since being launched in February 2008. The add-on adds a real-time search personalization “layer” directly on top of Google, Yahoo! and Bing, enabling users to benefit from the technology as they search on the major search engines.

The service is currently handling 1 million queries per day, allowing Surf Canyon to accurately study, using blind control-group tests, the objective enhancements offered by real-time search personalization. As detailed in the research paper entitled “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback (http://bit.ly/SurfCanyonResearch),” recently published by SIGIR, Surf Canyon’s technology increases the relevancy of organic search results by up to 40%. Further studies have subsequently been conducted to demonstrate the statistically-significant extent to which advertising revenue is enhanced.

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For further information, contact:
Steven Blinn
BlinnPR
TEL: (212) 675-4777 or (415) 578-3438
steven@blinnpr.com

About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time search personalization software. Its patents-pending technology transforms result pages from lists of static links into dynamic conversations, offering users an automated way to find relevant results buried deep within the search pages.

Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon, conducted an interview with Eric Matas at Technorati. Following up on being selected as “Best Search Engine” by the About Web Search Reader’s Choice Awards, Eric had this to say:

” I reached out to the CEO, Mark Cramer, who agreed to answer some questions about their search engine… By besting Google and with more than 200 million queries to date, Surf Canyon seems to be catching on.”

Here’s one interesting question and answer:

What was your most unusual job?

After my freshman year at MIT (1987) I got a summer job writing software at the Public Defender’s Office in download Boston. They had a database of case “squibs” that they wanted to be able to access through the input of combinations of keywords and Boolean operators. So I wrote one program to crawl the database, extract the words from the squibs and then assemble them in a reverse index. I then wrote a second program with a UI to accept the keyword and Boolean operator inputs, find matches in the reverse index and then print out lists of matching documents. Turns out, it worked great.

About.com has posted the winners of their 2010 Reader’s Choice Awards and we’re thrilled to announce that Surf Canyon won in the category of Best Search Engine. In their own words,

“The race for the Best Search Engine was intriguing, with a relatively unknown newcomer, Surf Canyon, picking up 48% of the votes and beating out search engine powerhouses Google, Yahoo! and Bing.”

Charles Knight at The Next Web Search covered the story and had this to say:

“Surf Canyon is Google on steroids (but it also works on Yahoo!, Bing, and Craigslist).  It turbo charges your web searches.”

We would like to thank our fans who voted for Surf Canyon as well as all of the users and partners who have helped to make our search engine what it is today.

[Update 3/5/10] It’s wonderful when we get coverage from all over the globe. Following up on the story above, Computer Plaything in Taiwan had a wonderfully detailed review of our application. From the translation we got this:

“The greatest impact Surf Canyon is the beginning of my article, I want to resolve the issues raised: how to efficiently tap the “search results page after the second” To me beads may be useful for those left behind of regret? Surf Canyon will simply beyond the second page of the first page of search results into related projects and, based on experience to optimize your click-related effects, to meet individual needs.

Surf Canyon not only to expand the list of a layer of relevant recommendations of the links, but also based on first layer, then you are more interested in results, to continue to expand (excavation) Other search content. Directly on the home page you will be able to continue to explore, level by level.

First of all, Surf Canyon can really help you put several pages inside the back extract relevant results.

Surf Canyon site where banners read, “Unleash the Power of Search (liberation of the potential of search engines)” and “Real-time Search Personalization (real-time search for Personalized)”, very apt expression of the Surf Canyon uses.“

We’ve also taken the liberty of including one of the screen shots, because it looks really cool:

Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon, recently had the pleasure of a technical discussion regarding real-time search personalization with David Harry, an SEO Expert and author of the very popular HuoMah SEO Blog. David has this to say about Surf Canyon:

“I recently had the extreme pleasure of meeting the gang at SurfCanyon, one VERY personal search engine (and FF add on). I was first turned onto this groovy tool more than a year ago and it was a thrill to hear from them. When it comes to personalization (and social search even) these folks really do take it to a new level.”

Yesterday we released the latest version of Surf Canyon’s client application. One of the most important enhancements you won’t even be able to “see,” but we’ve adjusted some of our processes to enhance the speed with which the application operates. Your Recommendations should now come faster than ever.

The change that you will be able to “see” is an aesthetic enhancement designed to help visually communicate the functionality of the application. Now when recommendations are inserted into the search results, they quickly come shooting up from the bottom of the page. This should make sense since all of the Recommendations come from further down in the result set. Using real-time search personalization, Surf Canyon helps people find relevant results that might otherwise have remained buried on pages 2 through 100 by pulling them up to the current page.