Henry Feild in the Computer Science Department at Endicott College and James Allan in the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, gave a quick mention to Surf Canyon in their paper entitled “Using CrowdLogger for In Situ Information Retrieval System Evaluation”:

… a popular tool called Surf Canyon modifies SERPs for major search engines by surfacing as-yet unseen search results from deeper in the rankings every time the user clicks on a result link (the goal is for the surfaced results to be similar to the clicked result).

Their paper discusses how CrowdLogger, an open-source browser extension for Firefox and Google Chrome, can be used as an in situ evaluation platform for “evaluating retrieval systems in the wild.” This is something Surf Canyon has been doing with its own retrieval system for many years.