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.

“I recently had the extreme pleasure of meeting the gang at SurfCanyon, one VERY personal search engine (and FF add on). I was first turned onto this groovy tool more than a year ago and it was a thrill to hear from them. When it comes to personalization (and social search even) these folks really do take it to a new level.”

“The use of implicit information from viewing of documents described in this section makes use of a user’s interaction history over many query sessions. An alternative is to automatically adjust the rankings in real time, during a single search session. Singh et al., 2008 use a version of the clickthrough inversion idea described in Chapter 5 to re-rank the hits returned for a single query and the user views those results. The terms associated with the links that have been clicked on so far are weighted positively, while those not clicked on are weighted negatively, to provide a real-time re-ranking. A similar idea is being promoted by the startup company SurfCanyon. This can be seen as an implicit version of the explicit re-rankings used in the Google search results personalization interface described above.”

The January 14th edition of the Mossberg Solution column in the Wall Street Journal also compares and contrasts Surf Canyon and Google’s SearchWiki.

• Real-time personalization – Easily find relevant information buried in Bing’s results with real-time re-ranking.
• Real-time results – Insert relevant real-time results from OneRiot and Twitter.
• Query refinements – Search reformulations are suggested based on your “at the moment” information need.
• Customize content – Use my.SurfCanyon.com to indicate the sources of information you prefer, as well as those you’d like to avoid.

Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team and author of The Next Big Thing, wrote about Surf Canyon’s integration with Bing:

Two… innovative startups, WebMynd and Surf Canyon, worked quickly to customize Bing with real-time search results powered by OneRiot. Surf Canyon CEO, Mark Cramer, said that they are excited about this integration because “Bing users can now re-rank search results ‘on the fly’ plus get OneRiot’s real-time web results to further transform Bing search results into dynamic portals of information.”

Additionally, the new version contains additional compatibility with Google’s search pages.

Finally, we’d like to suggest that our users give WOT (Web of Trust) a try. WOT warns you about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware, send spam or steal personal information. WOT’s color-coded icons show you ratings for over 22 million websites – green for trust, yellow for caution and red to stop – helping you avoid interaction with harmful sites. We ensured full compatibility with WOT in v2.0.3.

Enjoy! And, as always, we appreciate feedback.

Update (6/9/2009) – Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines covered the new release.

Refinements are suggested query reformulations based on your query and Surf Canyon’s real-time model of your inferred intent. In a sense, Refinements are personalized reformulations targeted to your “at the moment” information need. Furthermore, these links will send you to a search page where the results are already re-ranked, facilitating once again the process of finding what you need. The display of Refinements can be controlled under the Settings tab on my.SurfCanyon.com.

For users of our Firefox add-on, we have also introduced an on/off button in the right-hand corner of the Status Bar at the bottom of the browser. Clicking the button will quickly disable and re-enable Surf Canyon’s re-ranking

Lastly, we’d like to recommend that our users check out samfind Bookmarks Bar. This fully loaded Bar has a bit of social, search and RSS in it, is unobtrusive when not being used and has received excellent reviews from PC Magazine and PC World. Surf Canyon is also one of the default search engines. You might want to give it a try. Enjoy!

Update (5/3/2009) – Ashraf at dotTech.org posted a complimentary piece entitled “Surf Canyon: Using search engines just got easier.”

Update (5/8/2009) – Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines covered the release of our latest version, as did Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily who had this to say:

“… some browser extensions can really help streamline online searching. One of the best extensions for this is Surf Canyon… It’s only a tiny 33K extension, but it can be a great help in steering you quickly to the most relevant information on any search topic.

… Surf Canyon includes several useful features… The most useful of these is a new top-of-page collection of search refinement suggestions… The extension is smart enough [for example] to know that dolphins are intelligent, and that I may be interested in this aspect of them, and it also draws a relationship between dolphins and whales, in addition to other connections it makes.”

• Over 500 thousand people benefited from our search technology
• Over 80 million queries on Google, Yahoo!, Live Search and Craigslist were enhanced using our real-time re-ranking
• Over 350 million search results were “recommended”
• We shared the Mossberg Solution column in the WSJ with Google and were very well received
• ReadWriteWeb selected us as one of the Top 100 Products and Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
• Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, added us to their list of “Recommended” add-ons

As such, we are today officially removing the “Beta” label from our website and application.

The path for most every start-up is long and difficult and we continue to have a considerable amount of road before us. While we will inevitably face many new challenges, we’d like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to some of the people who’ve helped us to get this far:

• Mozilla for facilitating the development of add-ons as well as providing tremendous feedback and invaluable assistance in distributing the application
• Microsoft for prominently including our application in the IE Gallery and for SilkRoad
• Yahoo! for BOSS
• All of the companies who’ve built amazing search engines upon which we build
• Our investors for putting their confidence in our vision
• All of the journalists and bloggers who took the time and made the effort to evaluate our software
• All of the people who’ve downloaded our application and the thousands of people who’ve generously offered their encouragement, feedback, praise, criticisms, comments and advice

While it’s fun to look back at our accomplishments, we’re now focused on the year ahead and are very excited about the future.

“Crucially, these new results are cleverly slipped into the search results so that the original results page doesn’t look drastically different when a user navigates back.”

“Marti Hearst, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, says that Surf Canyon succeeds in presenting the reordered links in a clear, useful, and unobtrusive way. It doesn’t require people to do any extra work, as does Google’s WikiSearch, a feature that lets users personalize their results by voting them up or down.”

Personalization is often been divided into two categories, implicit and explicit, the respective merits of which have been debated. Implicit personalization is based on preferences inferred from behavioral information. While this doesn’t require any effort on the part of the user, making accurate determinations of intent can be challenging. On the other hand, explicit personalization is driven by direct indication from the user. The intent is often clearer, however, the onus is on the user to make the effort to specify preferences.

Since April 2006, Surf Canyon has been looking at personalization from a different perspective: real-time vs. long-term. Real-time personalization alters the user experience instantly as behavioral signals are collected. While determining intent “on the fly” is challenging given the requirement for speed and the paucity of data, the signals are typically very strong. Long-term personalization, by contrast, relies on the accumulation of considerable user data over a significant amount of time. Determining the user’s “at the moment” intent can be difficult given how quickly the signals decay and how often users change context.

Nevertheless, as indicated here, all of these options are currently available to the internet searcher:

Surf Canyon v1 – Our flagship product introduced real-time implicit personalization for search. By observing the actions of the user as the search is taking place, the application helps people find information by re-ranking the results instantly, effectively transforming the search page from a static list of links to a dynamic set of results that “work with” the user.

Google Personalization – By observing the search pattern and click history of the user over an extended period of time, Google builds a profile of the user’s long-term interests which are then used to personalize the results for future searches. The first post on this blog analyzed some of the benefits and shortcomings of this technology.

Surf Canyon v2 – Launched in December ’08, v2 of Surf Canyon introduced my.SurfCanyon.com, enabling users, should they so desire, to explicitly indicate sources of content they prefer as well as those that they dislike. These long-term preferences are then taken into account to, once again, personalize search results to the user’s benefit.

Google SearchWiki – Launched in November ’08, SeachWiki offers controls to enable users to manually manipulate search results. By clicking a button, results may immediately be “promoted” to the top of the search page or deleted altogether. The next time the user runs the same search, the user’s personal modifications will be displayed.

Different users will have varying appreciations for the costs and benefits associated with each of these technologies, however, they are all compatible and, to a large extent, compliment each other. Today’s internet searchers are therefore free to use all of them, some of them or none of them, as they prefer.

Update (1/15/09) – Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines ran this post under their “Guest Authors” series.

We are naturally thrilled to be sharing a such prominent column with a company we esteem so highly. Here are some excerpts:

“[SearchWiki and Surf Canyon] don’t necessarily compete against each other; in fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go, sorting results according to real-time user behavior.

If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches but would like to use other search engines or don’t want to do extra work, you might like Surf Canyon.

Google’s SearchWiki is asking users to do extra work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this tool’s personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn’t have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching are numbered.”

The real-time implicit personalization offered by Surf Canyon and the real-time explicit personalization offered by SearchWiki are both compatible and complimentary. You don’t have to pick one or the other when you can have both!

Update (1/14/09) – Katherine Boehret added a video. Here is what she had to say at the 3m20s mark:

“At the end of the day, Google SearchWiki makes you do a lot of work. It might be beneficial for some people who want to save their searches, but Surf Canyon works with you as you go, on the fly. It works automatically and doesn’t make you do anything extra other than what you’re already doing.”

Update (2/18/09) – Steven Blinn, PR consultant, talks with David Ward at PRWeek about getting coverage for Surf Canyon in the Wall Street Journal.

The introduction of my.SurfCanyon.com enables users to explicitly customize results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search by indicating domains that they prefer as well as those that they dislike. As a result, “preferred” domains will receive preferential treatment during re-ranking, while “disliked” domains will be removed entirely from the result set. User may either check boxes available on my.SurfCanyon.com or enter their own domains.

Furthermore, as show below, selecting a domain that provides news may add a customized “news block” to the top of the search results containing up-to-the-minute results from your preferred sources. Selecting either Amazon or eBay may also add, when appropriate, blocks of relevant product listings.

All of these settings can be changed by simply returning to my.SurfCanyon.com and saving new preferences.

Lastly, v2.0.0 introduces an “Odometer” designed to give users an idea of the “mileage” they’re getting from Surf Canyon. The “Search Boost” is simply an approximate measure of the rate at which Surf Canyon “recommended” results are selected when they are available. Values will naturally vary by individual, but 25 to 35% is a normal range. Buttons to disable and reset the Odometer are provided.

As for compatibility, Surf Canyon is now able to detect if SiteAdvisor is installed and active and, if so, will reposition the bull’s eyes. The application continues to be compatible with WOT and Google Preview. Finally, the “Settings” dialog box has been move to my.SurfCanyon.com.

Anthony Ha at VentureBeat covered the release:

“Cramer describes the distinction as real-time explicit customization (SearchWiki) versus long-term explicit (My SurfCanyon), but you don’t have to follow his terminology to see that SurfCanyon sounds easier.”

Jean-Marie Gall, a prominent technology blogger in France, added this:

“v2.0.0 is truly bursting with efficiency…  Congratulations to… Surf Canyon for all the remarkable work on this marvelous plug-in that I’ve been using since it launched.”

Update (12/17/08) – Vanessa Voltolina at FOLIO: magazine also covered the launch of v2.