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 Surf Canyon. (Translations from Portuguese with the assistance of Google.)

“Results offered by search engines mix websites that are truly relevant to the context of the user with websites that have a marginal similarity to the query, or that are totally irrelevant… results offered by search engines, which tend to return many irrelevant websites, require the user to perform a manual filtering of results to obtain those that truly reflect his or her interest. The effort employed in this filtering may be high according to the classification accuracy of the results offered by the search engine (HARDTKE, 2009; BRUSILOVSKY, 2009; [B] MICARELLI, 2007; PANT, 2003).”

“According KHOPKAR (2003), search engines that have features to enable user interaction in order to construct a model of user interests have a higher level of complexity of interaction. This interaction can occur in two ways: implicit feedback, in which user actions are captured in a non-intrusive manner, or explicit feedback, which requires the user’s direct intervention… Software such as Surf Canyon (HARDTKE, 2009) uses both modes of interaction, however, lay users have difficulty interacting with additional features such as icons displayed at the end of each link enabling the approximation of similar websites…”

“Surf Canyon is an interactive IR system that dynamically modifies the query results using Web-based personalization… This software is an extension of the user’s browser and operates on various search engines. The personalization of Web query results offered by this tool comes from the combination of implicit and explicit feedback. The classification is based on a user model that infers the immediate interest of the user. Surf Canyon adds an icon at the end of each result offered by the search engine. When you visit the result or click on this icon, Surf Canyon recommends links similar in context to the one clicked (HARDTKE, 2009).”

“User actions that are considered to identify a positive interest in a website are:

• Length of stay on the document between 2 and 30 minutes;
• Action to Save the document on the computer;
• Action to Add the document in the browser favorites.

These choices are given considering the work of Goecks and Shavlik (1999), LIU (2006), [B] MICARELLI (2007) and MANNING (2008), HARDTKE (2009) and also a survey of users described in Chapter II… HARDTKE (2009) comments in his work that a user click on a hyperlink returned by a query already represents an interest in that website…”

“The development of this work meets the discussions exposed by BRUSILOVSKY (2009), HARDTKE(2009), MANNING (2008), [B] MICARELLI (2007), among others, regarding the need to reduce the effort of locating relevant content on the Web by adapting the results obtained from the search engines according to the interests of user.”

We’re flattered and humbled by the continued recognition of our work.