Surf Canyon

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.

In the October edition of the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal, Surf Canyon was included in the list of “sizzling” lawyer-friendly apps designed to “pump up your PC, PDA and smartphone.” Under the “Research & Reference” section:

“Not sure your search engine is pulling up the results it should? Surf Canyon, a free Firefox and IE browser app, claims to accelerate your search process with Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Lexis Web and Craigslist by finding relevant results even if they’re buried in page 100 of your search results. With each search, Surf Canyon adds a bull’s-eye icon you can click on to highlight the additional results.”

As Anthony Ha at Venture Beat just reported, we have successfully closed an additional $250,000 in funding. We’re naturally excited by the vote of confidence from both our existing as well as new investors and would like to thank them for their support.

The good news, however, does not end there. As mentioned in the article, and previously on this blog, our application has been downloaded over 1 million times and we are now handling roughly 800,000 queries a day. Mozilla has been tremendously helpful in making our add-on available to Firefox users, which we appreciate greatly.

We’re also proud to welcome some exceptional new members to our Advisory Board:

• Jonathan Abrams - CEO of Socializr and founder of pioneering social network Friendster.
• Bob Christopher - Former CEO of Ugobe which raised $24 million and developed the Pleo.
• Dan Martin - Former VP of Business Development at HomeGain.

Finally, the research paper unambiguously demonstrating the extent to which our application enhances relevancy, which we presented at SIGIR ‘09, will shortly be published by SIGIR and become officially citable.

We’re working hard on the next revision to Surf Canyon and there will be more exciting news to come, so subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the upper left-hand corner, become a “fan” on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

We made our application compatible with IE8 back in March with the v2.0.3 release, and then enhanced the IE8 functionality in July with the v3.0.0 release by taking advantage of some specific IE8 features. In particular, we included image previews, along with the top 3 search results, directly in the SearchBar drop-down.

The official twitter page for Internet Explorer recognized our work this morning with the following tweet, which links to our add-on in the Internet Explorer Add-ons Gallery:

“Semantic real-time implicit personalization with Surf Canyon! What more could you want out of an IE8 add-on? http://bit.ly/kphrm“

Also in the IE Gallery you can find our Instant Visual Search plug-in, which offers just the SearchBar integration, as well as the Search Assistant by OneRiot. Together with OneRiot, the real-time search engine company with whom we’ve worked in the past, we’ve developed a OneRiot-customized version of the IE add-on for those users who wants to make sure to get real-time results when they’re searching on Bing, Google or Yahoo!:

Florence Ion at Maximum PC has selected Surf Canyon as the Firefox Add-on of the Week:

“When you need your search engine to be your utilitarian counterpart, Surf Canyon’s search engine assistant will make sure that you receive the most relevant information from your search queries… Surf Canyon helps to make sure that no matter what search engine you choose to peruse the web, you’ll always get information relevant to your needs.”

Microsoft Bing has invited Surf Canyon to co-sponsor, along with Aardvark and Worio, the Celebratory Closing Cocktail Reception at TechCrunch50. From 5:45-7:45pm on Tuesday the 15th, we’ll be hosting one of the bars in the main hall at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse. Our application will be on demonstration and there will be a surf board raffle, so stop by if you’re going to be at the event. Look for our banner!

[Update 9/16/09] Yesterday was a fabulous event! There were a lot of people and the energy was great. Quite a few individuals stopped by the Surf Canyon-sponsored bar to pick up drinks, grab of few flyers and check out the demo, so we’re pleased to have been able to participate. Thanks to Ali @ Worio for looping us in. Also, congratulations to Emmanuel Guisset from YourTour for winning the surf board raffle!