Importantly, relevant search results are increasingly deemed to be personalized. Autonomous search agents that make suggestions based on personal data, including the user’s location, metadata, and more advanced algorithms, are in sight. For example, Surf Canyon, a US company, is developing real-time, personalized search capabilities that transform static lists of search results into dynamic pages that rerank results based on a user’s real-time online activity.

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:

• Stephan Weitz – Director, Bing Search
• John Battelle – Founder, Federated Media and Author, The Search
• Johanna Wright – Product Management Director, Google Search
• ShaShi Seth – Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products
• Mark Cramer – CEO, Surf Canyon

Mark Cramer had this to say:

For the past 40 years since the inception of search, the way it’s worked is this: user enters a query, that query is matched to an index of documents, tremendous activity is deployed to try to determine the relevancies of those different documents, and a search result set is produced. But that search result set is static. There’s an order to those results. They go from 1 to 10 and then 11 to 50 million, and that order does not change. It’s stateless.

What we have been doing for the past few years is essentially applying state to the search page in order to make the results dynamic. And if you consider “dynamic” to be something resembling a conversation in the sense that the search result page is actually responding to every input from the user to alter the content on the fly, then I think that’s an interesting way of looking at searching.

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.

“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.

The portion about Surf Canyon begins at the 6m55s mark. Mr. Pisani starts with “Pick of the Week, use it, it’s called Surf Canyon,” before continuing with a demonstration and then:

This is artificial intelligence and [it makes your searches] more efficient.

The French version of the video is also available with the segment about Surf Canyon starting at the 6m37s mark.

For the past 40 years since the inception of search, the way it’s worked is this: user enters a query, that query is matched to an index of documents, tremendous activity is deployed to try to determine the relevancies of those different documents, and a search result set is produced. But that search result set is static. There’s an order to those results. They go from 1 to 10 and then 11 to 50 million, and that order does not change. It’s stateless. What we have been doing for the past few years is essentially applying state to the search page in order to make the results dynamic. And if you consider “dynamic” to be something resembling a conversation in the sense that the search result page is actually responding to every input from the user to alter the content on the fly, then I think that’s an interesting way of looking at searching.

The most useful is Surf Canyon, which offers a “real-time personalized search” that uses an artificial intelligence formula to adapt to the specific demands of the user. The idea is simple: only a small percentage of responses offered by any search engine correspond to what really interests us. Surf Canyon interprets each click as an indication of what may concern them and then finds similar information in the results offered by Google on the following pages (2, 5, 10, etc.) which are then deployed immediately below the newly activated link. The selection improves with every click, saving the user time.

Gordon had some very flattering things to say. After referring to one of the experiments outlined in our research paper, which was recently published by SIGIR, he replied, “A 40% uptick in user satisfaction by any measure is pretty impressive.” Later, after describing a little about the algorithm behind the re-ranking he responded, “That was impressive. An algorithm that recognizes the subtlety of subcontext has some decent IP cred behind it.” He concluded with:

“… I installed Surf Canyon and was fairly impressed. It was more helpful than I expected (though there may be few more skeptical critics of search user experiences than me)… If you’re not a search marketer [who often needs to see the “vanilla” version of the SERP], I’d definitely recommend taking it for a spin.”

Gordon’s next post in the series will be Part II of the conversation with Mark Cramer in which they will “speculate on where search might go in the future.”

[Update 10/1/2010] – Search Engine Land has published the second part of the interview.

” 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.