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” […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

Surf Canyon has been around since April of 2006, however, it was one year ago today that we launched our application to some very flattering reviews. Since then, there have been a number of exciting achievements during our first year: Over 500 thousand people benefited from our search technology Over 80 million queries on Google, […]

[Read more →]

Yesterday, The Mossberg Solution Column of the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Google’s SearchWiki and Surf Canyon. While we’ve released an update of our software to make sure that these two technologies are compatible and have discussed how they compliment each other, it’s perhaps worth positioning these technologies in a larger framework of […]

[Read more →]

Katherine Boehret at the Wall Street Journal wrote this week’s The Mossberg Solution column, which will appear in tomorrow’s print edition, entitled “Web Searches That Really Bear Fruit.” The subject, two “new free tools [that] aim to make online results more relevant by tracking your reactions,” is Google’s SearchWiki and Surf Canyon. We are naturally […]

[Read more →]

In a Part I, we began discussing some quantitative evaluations of the technology reported in our research paper.  The goal in these studies is to see if search engine users get any value out of real-time implicit personalization and, if so, to find metrics that we can use to quantify this value. One of the […]

[Read more →]

For the past 2½ years, we have been working to improve the web search experience. In particular, we feel that search results individualized to each user and their current context will prove superior to search results that are not personalized to real-time intent. Our hypothesis is that real-time personalization works and the  challenge for us […]

[Read more →]

Cuil just launched their search engine which boasts the largest index on the internet with 120 billion pages. (121,617,892,992 to be precise, as posted on their home page.) While the exact numbers are not always made available, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft also all have 10s of billions of pages in their indexes. Having as comprehensive […]

[Read more →]

Surf Canyon’s browser extension significantly accelerates the search process, enables searchers to find relevant information buried among results OAKLAND, CALIF. February 19, 2008 – Surf Canyon today announced the official release of its Discovery Engine for Search™ at www.SurfCanyon.com. The browser extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox, designed to disambiguate user queries in real time, […]

[Read more →]

It has been observed for some time that search engine users rarely venture past the first page of results. Various studies have shown that only 10% of the time does a user click on a result with a rank greater than 10. A typical user would thus rather reformulate the query or abandon the search […]

[Read more →]