We’re unaware to what extent there is precedent for two Firefox add-ons collaborating to produce an enhanced experience that is greater than the sum of its parts, but Edward Ackroyd at Google Preview provided us with code and instructions that enabled our application to first identify whether or not Google Preview is installed and, if so, insert the appropriate previews in the correct places. We’re pleased to be working with him.

Additionally, the UI for the new version has been translated into Russian, which looks very cool.

David Shaw at Bloggle announced the new release and had this to say:

“[Surf Canyon] really does improve on Google’s search results in real time… Best of all, you don’t move from Google - no new web page… It works extremely well, quickly and smoothly. The results are there if you want them, but if you choose not to use Surf Canyon’s recommendations, your page hardly looks different.”

In other news, Surf Canyon was selected as the Tip of the Day for July 17th by BootLog.co.uk, which has this to say:

“Obviously it can’t work miracles but after trying it for a couple of weeks I have to say it’s quite impressive and more often than not its suggested results get you to where you want to go a lot quicker then trudging through pages of hits.”

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These open source libraries implement much more functionality than what we required. All we want to do is pass in a word and get back a Set of Sets of synonyms for that word. For example, if you pass in the word “fair,” the returned Sets should include the Set of synonyms that mean “evenhanded,” another Set of synonyms that mean “carnival,” and another set of synonyms that mean “attractive.”

Following is a 100-line Java class that implements this functionality very quickly.  First, make sure your CLASSPATH includes the directory that contains the Wordnet database files. The class reads in 4 of the Wordnet database files. (The file names it uses are the file names from the UNIX distribution.  The Windows distribution uses different file names. For example, the UNIX data.verb file is called verb.dat on Windows.)

(more…)

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This week Surf Canyon is initiating a contest to promote the new “Email This” feature. A $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com will be distributed to a lucky winner, selected every Wednesday via a weekly drawing, for as long as the contest runs. To enter a friend to win, simply use the “Email This” feature to send him or her a search result, with contest@surfcanyon.com on copy. Have a friend email you a result and you’ll be entered to win, too!

Additionally, you can enter your friends to win by adding contest@surfcanyon.com on copy to the email using the “Invite your friends to use Surf Canyon” link.

Only one entry per person per day. If you’re not interested in participating, simply delete contest@surfcanyon.com from the “CC:” field. We never spam. We loathe spam.

Continue for the detailed rules & instructions…

(more…)

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• Now works if your browser does not accept cookies
• User interface translated to Deutsch and Português
• Craigslist enhancements
• Various patches and performance enhancements

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“I love this idea [Surf Canyon] for a few reasons. It fits neatly into what the user is already doing at the time: no upskilling or behavioral change necessary. It integrates beautifully with the existing real estate. It offers something of genuine value to the consumer.

I don’t know if Surf Canyon is making any money off its plug-in, but its approach exemplifies what made Google so successful: delivering what people want, when and how they want it.”

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If the “Hillary Clinton” search results that we reviewed a month ago could be considered “on message,” with many of her official sites lined up on page 1 and only one mishap on the first two pages (position #16), then John McCain has got an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem. It doesn’t help either, we imagine, that some people have deployed “Google bombs” to sabotage his results. The outcome, however, consists of three panics in a row on the very first page of results and two Google bombs on the second. Furthermore, the top 100 results are filled with far fewer “official” sites (24 vs 10).

Below we take a light-hearted look at the top 100 results for “John McCain” on Google. We added the “bomb” icons to the results based strictly on information from a Search Engine Land post, however, it’s entirely possible that, unknown to us, there were people bombing Hillary Clinton’s results as well.

(Note: the “bomb” results are perhaps considered as such not necessarily because of the political stance, but because of the perceived unfavorable slant with which the stance is portrayed.)

Now you’ll be asked to forgive us for demonstrating how our application makes all of this searching stuff better.

With almost 40 million results for John McCain, most of which are probably not relevant to your specific needs, how could you hope to dig through them all? Certainly you could page, page, page, or reformulate your query, but all of this is hard work. Fortunately, Surf Canyon has developed a search application to do the heavy lifting for you.

After you install the software, when you enter a search on one of your favorite search engines (currently Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and Craigslist) small bull’s eyes will appear next to each result. Click a bull’s eye next to the result you like, or the result itself for that matter, and Surf Canyon will figure out what you’re looking for and then dig deep into the result set (up to page 100!) and find what you need.

Here’s a quick example of what might happen if, using the search above, you click on result #2 (John McCain 2008…) and then the 3rd result recommended by Surf Canyon (McCain Agrees With Bush’s Remarks on Appeasement…):

Once again, with virtually no effort at all, relevant results, based on your actions as you search, are pulled out of the result set. If you would like this to happen for you, download and enjoy our search application.

Please let us know how did! Stay tuned for more…

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Next to every search result Surf Canyon has added an “Email This” link (indicated by the red circles below) that, when clicked, will open up your email client and load up the result for easy delivery. Simply enter the email addresses of whoever you like and press “Send.”

Important Note: Surf Canyon does not collect email addresses and will never spam. We loathe spam. As a matter of fact, unless you put Surf Canyon on copy, we can’t even know your email address, the addresses of the recipients or even that you sent the email.

Update (7/16/08): You can now use the “Email This” link to enter your friends to win a weekly gift certificate from Amazon.com.

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v1.1.0 for Firefox includes support for the release version of Firefox 3 and both the Internet Explorer and Firefox extensions are now integrated with Craigslist. When searching through classified listings on Craigslist, in addition to benefiting from Surf Canyon’s real-time relevancy calculations that pull forward pertinent results, displayed as “recommendations,” users can get “preview” images of the listings on the results page, as depicted below. Both of these enhancements provide an enhanced search experience while trying to find the apartment, automobile or knick-knack desired. (If Surf Canyon recommends your future spouse, please let us know.)

Above: Screen shot of Surf Canyon “recommending” a laptop on Craigslist.

The Preferences menu (under the “Tools” drop-down) has also been updated to enable turning the Craigslist integration on and off as well as adding the preview images.

Above: Screen shot of new “Preferences” menu.

Jean-Marie Gall, from France, had this to say about the update:

“Frankly, I could not do without Surf Canyon…”

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“When we saw Surf Canyon, we figured it was just another search add-on. It was obvious after installing it and searching around on Google for about 3 minutes that we were wrong… This is one to watch.”

Above: Screen shot of Surf Canyon as a “recommended” add-on on Mozilla.org. We added the circle.

Update (6/6/08): Today Mozilla added Surf Canyon to the rotation for the top slot on their add-on home page!

Above: Screen shot of Surf Canyon in the top position on Mozilla’s add-on home page. No circle required.

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