ChengXiang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 and another Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning and bioinformatics, and he has published over 100 papers in major conferences and journals in these areas, including five award papers.

He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Processing and Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Information Retrieval Journal. He is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004 , NAACL HLT 2007, and ACM SIGIR 2009, where Mark Cramer was a presenter. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received many awards, including the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2007 Microsoft Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, the 2009 IBM Faculty Award, the 2010 UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2011 HP Innovation Research Award.

We are thrilled to have ChengXiang on the team as we look forward to exploring new avenues to improve the efficiency of information retrieval as well as continuing our collaboration with the UIUC.

Surf Canyon is proud to be a sponsor of the Fifth Annual International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2012). After having our research selected for oral presentation at SIGIR ’09 in Boston and then having attended other academic conferences, we have a strong appreciation for the effort and dedication required to produce high-quality research in the very challenging field of search. While we didn’t have a paper to submit this time, we will naturally be attending the conference and look forward to the presentations as well as connecting, and reconnecting, with talented researches from around the world.

In the session “Reinventing the Search Experience,” between Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google, Mark will be talking about “Search as a Conversation – The End of the ‘Stateless’ Results Page.” Having dynamically re-ranked over 1.3 billion queries over the past few years, Surf Canyon is uniquely positioned to discuss the potential of one of the most significant relevance-enhancing innovations since PageRank.

[Update 5/10/11] The video of Mark’s presentation is now online:

The competition, however, is extremely stiff:

• AdBlock Plus – A perennial favorite, it has been download from Mozilla over 110 million times, has over 2000 user comments and has been the most popular add-on for as long as we can remember.
• DownThemAll! – With over 40 million downloads, this is another favorite for people who want to download videos.
• Greasemonkey – Surf Canyon started out as a Greasemonkey script. With over 40 million downloads, too, not only are we fans, but we owe this one a debt of gratitude.
• StumbleUpon – Funded by some of the most prominent angels in Silicon Valley, acquired by eBay for $75MM in 2007 and then sold back to its founders in 2009, this hugely popular add-on is also one of the most financially successful add-ons ever.

We are honored, as we were last year, to be in such esteemed company. But we, too, bring quite a few things to the table. As the developer of an innovative and powerful search technology, there are few companies (if any) that can lay claim to dramatically improving the relevancy of Google’s own search results. We have also received many plaudits from users and the media as well as significant recognition in the academic community. The future of search, arguably one of the most important endeavors on the internet, is not always easy to see, but we are delivering it for millions of people every day.

So vote for Surf Canyon! Thank you and, as always, we appreciate the support.

As of last Thursday, Surf Canyon now offers users the option of having these same content farm results automatically removed from their searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Simply download the latest version of our browser extension and then either click the button here or go to the Domains tab at my.SurfCanyon.com, select the “Remove content farm sites from the search page” box and save your preference. It is that easy.

ProductivityPortfolio blogged about this new feature this morning. It is unclear how they discovered the capability since we are only announcing it right now, but good for them!

Enjoy!

Note: The title of this post is from the Monty Python sketch.

[Update 2/16/11 - David Harry, with whom we spoke previously, references Mark Cramer and offers his take on the content farm situation in the latest issue of Search Engine Land.]

“Dynamic” is the future of search and we feel we have a critical element to add to that. Instant makes the page faster (dynamically updating the SERP after every key press), however, our innovation makes it more relevant (dynamically updating the order of results after every mouse click). The two together (Google Instant + Surf Canyon) make the search experience “Fully Dynamic.”

There are presently two ways to experience Fully Dynamic search: at the newly launched instant.SurfCanyon.com and, as always, by navigating over to Google after downloading our browser extension.

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.

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.

###########

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.