We are delighted to announce that on Friday the USPTO awarded Surf Canyon its third patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,442,973, to be issued on May 14th, for “Real Time Implicit User Modeling for Personalized Search.” This is an important piece of intellectual property, as evidenced by the fact it has been referenced over 25 times [...]

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This paper, entitled “Personalizing Web Search using Long Term Browsing History,” was submitted to WSDM in 2011, but only recently came to our attention. The authors, Nicolaas Matthijs from the University of Cambridge and Filip Radlinski from Microsoft, write about “a user interest profile using users’ complete browsing behavior,” but we thank them for taking [...]

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Having conducted early research into the strategies and benefits of Implicit User Modeling for Personalized Search, we are pleased to announce that ChengXiang Zhai, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has joined Surf Canyon’s Board of Advisers. ChengXiang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 [...]

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The research team at Cornell University, headed by Professor Thorsten Joachims, has produced another paper relating to Surf Canyon entitled “Structured Learning of Two-Level Dynamic Rankings.” It was presented on October 26, 2011 at CIKM in Glasgow. This paper further explores the concept of “Dynamic Ranked Retrieval” by proposing a two-level dynamic ranking model: For [...]

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“New Learning Frameworks for Information Retrieval” is the title of Yisong Yue’s January 2011 Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University. (Professor Thorsten Joachims, his Ph.D. adviser, flatteringly reviewed Surf Canyon in the past.) While the thesis generally “proposes principled approaches to formalize the learning problems for information retrieval, with an eye towards developing a united learning [...]

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At the 19th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2008), researchers from the School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University College Dublin, Ireland, published a fascinating research paper entitled “A recommender system approach to enhance web search and query formulation.” They begin by observing that “the traditional search interface has [...]

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Our research, published by SIGIR in December ’09, has now been cited in an academic work for the first time. In a paper entitled “An Approach to the Customization of Web Search Results,” Professors Dr. Sérgio Roberto Pereira da Silva and Dra. Valéria Delisandra Freltrim from the Universidade Estadual de Maringá make several references to [...]

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On the heals of being mentioned in Professor Marti Hearst’s new book, we’re thrilled to announce that the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval has selected Surf Canyon to present at SIGIR 2009. Considered one of the most important conferences in the field of information retrieval, the event will be in [...]

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Yesterday, The Mossberg Solution Column of the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Google’s SearchWiki and Surf Canyon. While we’ve released an update of our software to make sure that these two technologies are compatible and have discussed how they compliment each other, it’s perhaps worth positioning these technologies in a larger framework of [...]

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In a Part I, we began discussing some quantitative evaluations of the technology reported in our research paper.  The goal in these studies is to see if search engine users get any value out of real-time implicit personalization and, if so, to find metrics that we can use to quantify this value. One of the [...]

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