Surf Canyon

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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For the past 2½ years, Surf Canyon has been working to improve the web search experience. In particular, we feel that search results individualized to each user and their current context will prove superior to search results that are not personalized to real-time intent. Our hypothesis is that real-time personalization works and the  challenge for [...]

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Cuil just launched their search engine which boasts the largest index on the internet with 120 billion pages. (121,617,892,992 to be precise, as posted on their home page.) While the exact numbers are not always made available, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft also all have 10s of billions of pages in their indexes. Having as comprehensive [...]

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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 the search [...]

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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 [...]

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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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