Surf Canyon

Our Chief Scientist, David Hardtke, Ph.D., enters into a friendly conversation with Exalead on AltSearchEngines regarding the merits and limitations of both explicit and implicit personalization.

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It has been observed for some time that search engine users rarely venture past the first page of results. Various studies have shown that only 10% of the time does a user click on a result with a rank greater than 10. A typical user would thus rather reformulate the query or abandon […]

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“Personalization,” which is the tailoring of a product to the specific interests and needs of an individual, has been widely heralded as an important web innovation as search engines, and websites in general, work to deliver greater value to users. There are, in general, two types of personalization, explicit and implicit, which must both be […]

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Perhaps lost in all the coverage surrounding the extraordinary financial successes of search-related companies is the story regarding growing dissatisfaction with internet search. These stats from an InformationWeek article entitled “The Ultimate Search Engine” are nonetheless becoming more familiar:
“People search for 11 minutes on average before finding what they’re looking for, and half abandon searches […]

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Personalization has been around as long as, well, people. Each of us is different, so it’s no surprise that people and businesses strive to customize their messages and products to cater to individual preferences. Occasionally this process can take a while (Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography, “Any customer can have a car painted any […]

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