Surf Canyon

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

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 Bing, Google and Yahoo!, 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, Bing, and Yahoo.”

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 what 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.

On January 28th, Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon, offered some advice regarding entrepreneurship to students at The Pennsylvania State University. Connecting via Skype, he spoke to Professor Jim Jansen’s IdeaPitch course in the College of Information Sciences and Technology about the “mental and affective aspects of starting a company.”

Once again, Mike Wertheim, our Chief Architect, participated in a panel discussion at the 2009 Add-on-Con on December 11th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Like last year’s topic, this one was related to cross-browser development. For everyone who missed it, you can watch the video either below or on the Add-on-Con blog.

The latest version of Surf Canyon (v3.0.2) went out yesterday, so many of you have already received the auto-update. The important new feature is “sharing.” In collaboration with Shareaholic, Surf Canyon now enables users to share virtually any webpage on the internet. By clicking the envelope button in the URL bar at the top of the Firefox browser (this feature is not yet available for Internet Explorer), users can send the webpage currently being viewed to friends and colleagues via email, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.

Should you be interested in more sharing options, from over 60 different services, we’d like to invite you to download the full version of Shareaholic. Shareaholic is an award-winning add-on that has been downloaded over 1 million times by people looking for a customizable, light-weight method of sharing web pages.

Additionally, we’ve expanded the Craigslist image preview functionality to enable full-sized previews upon mouse-over.

[Update 11/13/09] v3.0.3 was released a couple days after v3.0.2 to fix a couple issues that snuck through.

Real-time Personalization Application for Google, Bing and Yahoo! Experiences User Growth Along With Industry Recognition for SIGIR

OAKLAND, CALIF. November 10, 2009 – Surf Canyon (www.SurfCanyon.com), the developer of the popular application that delivers real-time search personalization on Google, Bing and Yahoo!, proudly announces that yesterday it surpassed one million queries per day.

“Crossing the million queries a day threshold is an impressive accomplishment,” said Mike Cassidy, CEO of travel guide and tour review site Ruba and co-founder of Direct Hit, a search engine that pioneered using user activity to affect relevancy. “Surf Canyon’s real-time search personalization is an exciting innovation and their growth clearly indicates that users are appreciating the value.”

Moreover, in a sign of recognition from the search community, SIGIR, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, has decided to publish Surf Canyon’s research. The paper, entitled “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback: http://www.surfcanyon.com/SurfCanyonDemonstrationResearchPaper.pdf,” was presented at the SIGIR conference in July. Using blind, control-group studies, the research demonstrates how real-time search personalization is able to improve relevancy, on top of the major search engines, by up to 40%.

“Surf Canyon’s evaluation is done on an operational system with real users, and it gives a lot of insight into the benefits of real-time personalization,” said Thorsten Joachims, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. “This is a great paper and one of the most interesting, original and relevant IR papers I have read in a while!”

Surf Canyon operates with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Craigslist. During a standard search, as the user makes selections, Surf Canyon’s instantaneous relevancy algorithm determines what information is being sought and then re-ranks the results “on the fly,” digging out pertinent documents from as deep as page 100.

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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 implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-pending technology transforms search from lists of static links into dynamic result pages, enabling users to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among all the less relevant results.

We’re honored to announce that Surf Canyon has been invited to participate in the Web Discovery & Search Panel at Piper Jaffray’s Fifth Annual Global Internet Summit to be held at the Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park on November 10th and 11th.

This is the second year in a row that Surf Canyon has participated on a panel at the GIS. Last year’s conference was a great success and this year Mark Cramer will be sharing the panel with Paul Forster from Indeed, Venky Harinarayan from Kosmix, Ted West from LookSmart, Tobias Peggs from OneRiot and Nancy Harvey from Wolfram Research. Once again, the panel discussion will be moderated by Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst.