TechCrunch and VentureBeat both broke the news a couple of weeks ago, but today the official press release went out over the wire:

Surf Canyon Receives Seed Funding for Search Application

Surf Canyon’s innovative technology accelerates the search process, enables searchers to find relevant information buried among results

OAKLAND, CALIF. May 28, 2008 – Surf Canyon today announced the close of its initial seed round of financing. $600,000 in funding was received from prominent investors and business executives in San Francisco, New England, Paris and London. The proceeds will be used for continued development of the company’s Discovery Engine for Search™, an application (available for Internet Explorer and Firefox at www.SurfCanyon.com) that accelerates the search process on Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live.

“I met the founders of Surf Canyon in March and am extremely impressed with both the team and their vision for transforming search,” said Tom Brackett, a seed round participant and angel investor from Connecticut. “After using the product for an extended period of time, I am also astounded by the extent to which it improves the search experience.”

“We’re thrilled at the support received from our investors,” said Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon. “These funds enable a number of new possibilities and we’re looking forward to executing on our strategy, which will include expanding the team and launching a Marketing campaign designed to introduce the product to more users.”

Understanding user intent is one of the principal challenges of information retrieval. When there were only tens or hundreds of millions of items on the internet, relying on comparatively fuzzy notions of intent derived from two- and three-word queries was largely sufficient. Now that the major search engines index tens of billions of items, however, it has become increasingly difficult, if not mathematically impossible, to effectively match these queries with the available content. Thus, in order to produce relevant results, more information regarding the user’s intent is required. Surf Canyon alleviates this problem by extracting insight from post-query behavior signals, as the search is being conducted, and then exploiting the intelligence immediately to enable users to find relevant information buried in the result set.

According to Gene Munster, a Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray who specializes in Internet and Digital Media, “After having spent time analyzing Surf Canyon’s product, we believe that, because of its ability to quickly and easily enable users to locate relevant information that might otherwise have been impossible to find, real-time personalization represents a significant next step in the evolution of search.”

About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-pending Discovery Engine for Search™ transforms result pages from lists of static links into dynamic knowledge resources, enabling users to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among all the irrelevant results, significantly accelerating the search process. Surf Canyon has headquarters in Oakland, California and is recognized by DEMO.com as an “Innovator to Watch.”