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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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 […]

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In a previous post we mentioned the research on Dynamic Ranked Retrieval conducted by Professor Thorsten Joachims, Christina Brandt, Yisong Yue and Jacob Bank at Cornell University and that their paper was accepted for publication and then selected as one of the six Best Paper Candidates by WSDM 2011. While this is a bit belated, […]

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The 2013 ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) is one of the major forums for research on database management, information retrieval, and knowledge management. As such, we are proud to announce that our latest research paper, entitled “Understanding How People Interact with Web Search Results that Change in Real-Time Using Implicit Feedback,” […]

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We are delighted to announce that on Friday the USPTO awarded Surf Canyon its third patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,442,973, to be issued on May 14th, for “Real Time Implicit User Modeling for Personalized Search.” This is an important piece of intellectual property, as evidenced by the fact it has been referenced over 25 times […]

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This paper, entitled “Personalizing Web Search using Long Term Browsing History,” was submitted to WSDM in 2011, but only recently came to our attention. The authors, Nicolaas Matthijs from the University of Cambridge and Filip Radlinski from Microsoft, write about “a user interest profile using users’ complete browsing behavior,” but we thank them for taking […]

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Having conducted early research into the strategies and benefits of Implicit User Modeling for Personalized Search, we are pleased to announce that ChengXiang Zhai, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has joined Surf Canyon’s Board of Advisers. ChengXiang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 […]

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The research team at Cornell University, headed by Professor Thorsten Joachims, has produced another paper relating to Surf Canyon entitled “Structured Learning of Two-Level Dynamic Rankings.” It was presented on October 26, 2011 at CIKM in Glasgow. This paper further explores the concept of “Dynamic Ranked Retrieval” by proposing a two-level dynamic ranking model: For […]

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“New Learning Frameworks for Information Retrieval” is the title of Yisong Yue’s January 2011 Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University. (Professor Thorsten Joachims, his Ph.D. adviser, flatteringly reviewed Surf Canyon in the past.) While the thesis generally “proposes principled approaches to formalize the learning problems for information retrieval, with an eye towards developing a united learning […]

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