Real-time Personalization Application for Google, Yahoo! and Bing Experiences User Growth Along With Industry Recognition for SIGIR

OAKLAND, CALIF. November 10, 2009 – Surf Canyon (www.SurfCanyon.com), the developer of the popular application that delivers real-time search personalization on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, proudly announces that yesterday it surpassed one million queries per day.

“Crossing the million queries a day threshold is an impressive accomplishment,” said Mike Cassidy, CEO of travel guide and tour review site Ruba and co-founder of Direct Hit, a search engine that pioneered using user activity to affect relevancy. “Surf Canyon’s real-time search personalization is an exciting innovation and their growth clearly indicates that users are appreciating the value.”

Moreover, in a sign of recognition from the search community, SIGIR, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, has decided to publish Surf Canyon’s research. The paper, entitled “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback: http://www.surfcanyon.com/SurfCanyonDemonstrationResearchPaper.pdf,” was presented at the SIGIR conference in July. Using blind, control-group studies, the research demonstrates how real-time search personalization is able to improve relevancy, on top of the major search engines, by up to 40%.

“Surf Canyon’s evaluation is done on an operational system with real users, and it gives a lot of insight into the benefits of real-time personalization,” said Thorsten Joachims, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. “This is a great paper and one of the most interesting, original and relevant IR papers I have read in a while!”

Surf Canyon operates with Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Craigslist. During a standard search, as the user makes selections, Surf Canyon’s instantaneous relevancy algorithm determines what information is being sought and then re-ranks the results “on the fly,” digging out pertinent documents from as deep as page 100.

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For further information, contact:
Steven Blinn
BlinnPR
TEL: (212) 675-4777 or (415) 578-3438
steven@blinnpr.com

About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-pending technology transforms search from lists of static links into dynamic result pages, enabling users to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among all the less relevant results.