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 Boston from July 19th-23rd. Mark Cramer, CEO, will be presenting the research paper “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback” at the workshop “Understanding the user – Logging and interpreting user interactions in information search and retrieval.”

During the submission process, one reviewer, an Associate Professor of Computer Science, had this to say:

“The paper presents an empirical evaluation of an algorithm for improving search results from implicit feedback in web search. The algorithm is proprietary, but nevertheless the evaluation is extremely interesting. Unlike most prior work, the evaluation is done on an operational system with real users, and it gives a lot of insight into the benefits of short term personalization. This is a great paper and one of the most interesting IR papers I have read in a while! This paper by itself would already make me come to the workshop. Very interesting, original, and relevant.”

Charles Knight, at Alt Search Engines, followed up with a post.

[Update 12/18/09] – The “Understanding the User: Logging and Interpreting User Interactions in Information Search and Retrieval” workshop report was recently posted on the SIGIR forum. The workshop proceedings, with a link to our research paper, have also been published.