Surf Canyon

This morning, Carla Thompson, senior analyst at The Guidewire Group, had some glowing things to say about her experiences with Surf Canyon:

“I’ve been using the plug-in for several weeks now and have quickly grown to love it. It’s one of my favorite types of technology - I downloaded it and forgot about it until it made my life easier.”

“Clicking on a link that interested me returned a related result from page 16 of the Google results - one I never would have seen without Surf Canyon.”

“[It is] an easy-to-use service on the front and complex algorithms on the back that make my existing search habits much more productive.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch also had nice things to report:

“[Surf Canyon] offer[s] improvements to the pared-down search interface that we are all used to and point[s] to areas where search can be made better.”

“… what I like best about Surf Canyon is the interface. It doesn’t take you to another Web page. The recommended results just appear underneath the appropriate link. It feels more like an application than a cumbersome Website where you have to click through multiple pages to find what you want. Google could take a lesson in interface design from Surf Canyon here with all of its Ajax goodness.”

Elinor Mills at CNET kicked off the day at 5am PST with this:

“[Surf Canyon] was a much quicker way to find [a colleague’s] articles than scanning through pages of Web results.”

Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines, provided a very thorough review of the product, the problem it addresses and the solution it delivers. VentureBeat and InformationWeek also covered the launch as did StreetReporters.net in Paris.

Update (2/20/08) : Christophe Deschamps at Outils Froids has updated his review:

“What is certain is that I’ve been using [Surf Canyon] for two months and it has become totally indispensable.”

Mike Gunderloy at Web Worker Daily offered this:

“… if you need to quickly narrow down on a set of results from an ambiguous heap, [Surf Canyon] shines.”

Finally, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Profy observed that:

“[Surf Canyon] speeds up that whole paging-through-results dance or the far nerdier insert-boolean spasm we all do when trying to find something.”

Update (2/21/08) : A couple more reviews came in from France. Alain Joannes at Journalistiques has returned with this:

“Surf Canyon implemented in my Firefox browser is simply fulgurant.” (Editor’s note: We had to look it up. Fulgurant, adj., amazingly impressive; suggestive of the flashing of lightning.)

Rue89 also posted an article entitled “Welcome to the Third Age of Online Search” which offered Google Personalization and Surf Canyon as two examples of how personalization is the next major improvement in the evolution of search technology.

Update (9/10/08): Today Alt Search Engines posted an English translation on the Rue89 article.