You may be forgiven for thinking that this post is the same as the previous, but as scientists are wont to do, we are conducting a 2nd experiment with eBay’s API in an attempt to replicate and confirm the impressive results from the 1st experiment. This time, however, rather than randomly and evenly splitting users […]

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Over the years at Rank Dynamics we have made considerable effort to “road test” our technology with real users whenever possible. The first opportunity came in 2008 when we studied how users with our browser extension selected results on Google. By using a result interleaving technique designed by Professor Thorsten Joachims to determine user preference […]

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After nine years operating under the name Surf Canyon, we are pleased to announce our new branding. The real-time contextualization at the heart of our Dynamic Ranking technology, which has received rave reviews from users, the media and the search community, and has produced dramatic improvements in relevance over Google, will still be at the […]

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July 17th, 2012 was the last time we were able to successfully update our browser extension on AMO, Mozilla’s extension directory. That was version 3.4.3. Many things have obviously happened since then, including new features, bug fixes and optimizations. We’re therefore now happy to announce that Surf Canyon version 5.4.0, fully compatible with Firefox 35.0 […]

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From the very beginning, Surf Canyon has been using the query “dolphins” as an illustration of how real-time contextualization can significantly enhance the user’s search experience. In the field of information retrieval this query is a classic example of ambiguity: is the user looking for the football team or the animal? Other queries like “bears” […]

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Surf Canyon CEO Mark Cramer was honored to be interviewed by Robert Scoble on May 27th. While we always enjoy talking about how our technology dramatically improves the search experience, it is especially exciting to do so with such a renowned blogger and evangelist, who has a studio with three cameras. Here is a table […]

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When doing something that has never been done before (as we do), it can be challenging to describe it using familiar terminology in a way that doesn’t create confusion while still conveying the newness of the idea. Large companies are sometimes capable of creating new terminology that is then adopted by others, but this can […]

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Anyone familiar with Etsy knows that it is a fantastic website for finding handmade and vintage items, and a wonderful resource for gift-giving. Now, thanks to their search API and Rank Dynamics’s dynamic ranking technology, there is an improved, more conversational, way to search through the millions of items for sale on Etsy. Click over […]

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The College Humor video below is NSFW, contains some profanity and mild sexual situations, but we’re posting it here because not only is it amusing, but it is an interesting insight into the relationship between users and search engines. People struggle to find the “magic” set of keywords to describe their information need. As we […]

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To put together a demonstration of Surf Canyon’s search technology with Etsy’s products, we needed some Java code that would search Etsy and return a list of matching products.  We assumed that this could probably be done in about 100 lines of Java code. We also figured someone must have done this before, but after […]

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