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.”

In their paper entitled “Beyond the Commons: Investigating the Value of Personalizing Web Search,” Teevan et al. make the observation that:

“Web queries are very short, and it is unlikely that a two- or three-word query can unambiguously describe a user’s informational goal.”

Ambiguous intent combined with an exploding quantity of content on the internet makes it increasingly difficult to put all of the relevant results on page one while simultaneously eliminating those that are not pertinent.

Very few people venture past the first page of search results to find what they want, so returning hundreds of thousands or even millions of results is of little value to the user. (You cannot look past the first 1000 even if you wanted to.) Even if the user is particularly motivated, the process of digging through page after page of results is nothing short of tedious, which is the reason users will either quickly turn to reformulating their query or abandoning the search.

The problem is too many results!

The solution to the conundrum is to have a greater understanding of the user’s intent in order to more precisely focus the results. One way to achieve this is to get the user to explicitly specify intent by entering more keywords, although getting people to change behavior is not easy. Another way to achieve this is to implicitly infer intent through the type of long-term personalization offered by Google, although this too has a number shortcomings.

The most effective way to resolve this issue is to implicitly infer intent from real-time behavior signals and then immediately re-rank the results, through the use of instantaneous relevancy calculations, so that the most pertinent results are moved to the top while the less relevant are suppressed. Surf Canyon‘s Discovery for Search™ is such a solution. Disambiguating intent “on the fly” not only enables users to continue searching with their current behavior, but no search histories or profiles are required. Furthermore, the signals are strong so that the results can be reordered dramatically and the user can actually “see” the process working, creating a more encouraging and perhaps entertaining search experience.

“The weakest link here is … being dependent on users structuring their search queries so as to accurately depict their objective as otherwise the in-context Ads will be as useless to the user as the search results. Such a requirement is taxing for the user and better alternatives will be introduced into that market space over time.”

He goes on to explain how Surf Canyon is one such alternative. Meanwhile, Aaron Pava, at CivicActions, offered the following:

“Surf Canyon, one of my favorite search add-ons to improve Google search, auto-updated today – reminding me that I’ve been meaning to share this for the Way We Work.”

“People search for 11 minutes on average before finding what they’re looking for, and half abandon searches without getting that far, according to Microsoft. By Gartner’s estimate, half of potential Web sales are lost because visitors simply can’t find what they want.”

Furthermore, a May 2007 study by Autobytel and Kelton Research asserts that “72% of consumers report experiencing ‘search engine fatigue’ (i.e., a high level of frustration) when researching a topic on the Internet” and that “65% of consumers say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines.”

Search is not “broken,” but if half of users abandon searches without ultimately being satisfied, half of potential sales are lost and 3 out of 4 people are feeling frustration, then clearly there is substantial room for improvement.

It is our contention that there are two major factors driving this dissatisfaction:

1. The quantity of content on the internet is exploding. Google announced 6 billion items in their index way back in 2004, and one may only speculate at where it is today. Yahoo! has since proclaimed 20 billion items and, more recently, Microsoft declared a quadrupling of their index to 20 billion items. As discussed previously, it is virtually impossible to navigate that much information with two- and three-word queries.
2. As users become more familiar with search and the internet, their expectations increase. As John Battelle noted in his book “The Search”, “Surfers [are moving] from a stance of exploration (‘What’s out there?’) to expectation (‘I want to find something that I know is out there’).” When people know that the information is out there and expect to find it, but yet they can’t because it’s buried under an avalanche of irrelevant results, frustration naturally ensues.

There are, not surprisingly given the enormity of the stakes at hand, many strategies for combating this problem. Yet it is particularly instructive to note what users are actually doing during those 11 minutes to over two hours. Since most everyone has already been there, we know that it consists primarily of clicking on various results and, most importantly, query reformulation.

Query reformulation is a major challenge facing internet searchers today. 28% of all queries are reformulations of a previous query and, in such cases, the average query is reformulated 2.6 times. While experienced users know how to manipulate terms, use quotes, employ Boolean operators and even filter out documents, the outcome is that there is a direct relationship between the quality of the results and the skill of the searcher.

The major search engines, recognizing this problem, have implemented functionality to facilitate query reformulation. Yahoo!’s Search Assist will suggest keywords and related concepts as users enter queries. Google will often provide links to “related searches” at the top or bottom of their results page and they are also working on Google Suggest, a feature similar to Search Assist. Live Search has “related searches” on their results page and Ask.com has “search suggestions” during the entering of the query as well as “narrow your search” suggestions on the results page.

Nevertheless, these features and others like them presuppose a certain level of knowledge on the part of the user and require user time and effort to explicitly refine the query. Even experienced users with the aid of query suggestions might not be able to find the exact, magical combination of words and operators to accurately express intent, either because the vocabulary is unknown or the objective is imprecise.

As such, current search technologies do not yet do enough to assist users during the search process. The search results page, with its results, maps, photos, query suggestions and other offerings, is treated as a static creation presented to the end user as a final product. Once delivered, the onus is upon the user to dig through all of the pages of results and either find the information sought or reformulate the query.

It is precisely for this reason that Surf Canyon has developed Discovery for Search™ technology to work with searchers to help them find what they need. There is great benefit to the user in allowing the search results page to be dynamic, altering and refining the presentation of information as a search is being conducted. What might have been the most efficient ranking of millions of matched documents at the moment the user pressed the ‘search’ button is most likely not the case after the user’s very next action. Personalizing the search results in real time, on the fly, not only enables people to find information faster and with less effort, diminishing ‘search engine fatigue,’ but actually encourages people along the way by actively assisting with their efforts.