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 thrilled to be sharing a such prominent column with a company we esteem so highly. Here are some excerpts:

“[SearchWiki and Surf Canyon] don’t necessarily compete against each other; in fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go, sorting results according to real-time user behavior.

If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches but would like to use other search engines or don’t want to do extra work, you might like Surf Canyon.

Google’s SearchWiki is asking users to do extra work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this tool’s personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn’t have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching are numbered.”

The real-time implicit personalization offered by Surf Canyon and the real-time explicit personalization offered by SearchWiki are both compatible and complimentary. You don’t have to pick one or the other when you can have both!

Update (1/14/09) – Katherine Boehret added a video. Here is what she had to say at the 3m20s mark:

“At the end of the day, Google SearchWiki makes you do a lot of work. It might be beneficial for some people who want to save their searches, but Surf Canyon works with you as you go, on the fly. It works automatically and doesn’t make you do anything extra other than what you’re already doing.”

Update (2/18/09) – Steven Blinn, PR consultant, talks with David Ward at PRWeek about getting coverage for Surf Canyon in the Wall Street Journal.

We are honored to announce that ReadWriteWeb has selected Surf Canyon as one of the Top Ten Alternative Search Engines for 2008! According to Charles Knight, Editor of AltSearchEngines:

“… Surf Canyon understands implicitly what you are looking for.”

“As evidence of just how much the landscape is changing, three of our top 10 products require one-time downloads: once thought to be the kiss of death when Google sits in wait. But AltSearchEngines thinks that 2009 will be the tipping point when the rewards outweigh the “risks,” at least for power users. For everyone else: 2010. Faroo, KallOut, and Surf Canyon (and, again, Tazti) are all well worth leaving your comfort zone for.”

“Can I say it again? Search, after ten years, is no longer that ubiquitous box in the middle of the web page. In 2008, it gave way to innovative search tools that integrate useful features in new ways. Surf Canyon is also a download. I wonder how many commenters will say that no one will download an app? (Sigh.) The reason it’s worth the download is that it turbo charges your regular searches. Surf Canyon actually watches what you do — and don’t do — and what you click on, and it instantly pulls search results from deeper pages (say, page 8 ) and brings them forward if it determines that they can save you time — a lot of time. And if you’re still hesitant about the download, watch the video.”

Update (12/21/08) – Gwen Harris at Internet News had this comment on the Top 10 List:

“I’m one who would rather not download… but Surf Canyon was irresistible.”

Update (12/23/08) – Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb followed up with their Top 100 Products of 2008, which includes Surf Canyon in the Alternative Search Engine category. This article was picked up by the New York Times.

Today Surf Canyon released it’s most important update since originally launching in February – version 2.0.0.

The introduction of my.SurfCanyon.com enables users to explicitly customize results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search by indicating domains that they prefer as well as those that they dislike. As a result, “preferred” domains will receive preferential treatment during re-ranking, while “disliked” domains will be removed entirely from the result set. User may either check boxes available on my.SurfCanyon.com or enter their own domains.

Furthermore, as show below, selecting a domain that provides news may add a customized “news block” to the top of the search results containing up-to-the-minute results from your preferred sources. Selecting either Amazon or eBay may also add, when appropriate, blocks of relevant product listings.

All of these settings can be changed by simply returning to my.SurfCanyon.com and saving new preferences.

Lastly, v2.0.0 introduces an “Odometer” designed to give users an idea of the “mileage” they’re getting from Surf Canyon. The “Search Boost” is simply an approximate measure of the rate at which Surf Canyon “recommended” results are selected when they are available. Values will naturally vary by individual, but 25 to 35% is a normal range. Buttons to disable and reset the Odometer are provided.

As for compatibility, Surf Canyon is now able to detect if SiteAdvisor is installed and active and, if so, will reposition the bull’s eyes. The application continues to be compatible with WOT and Google Preview. Finally, the “Settings” dialog box has been move to my.SurfCanyon.com.

Anthony Ha at VentureBeat covered the release:

“Cramer describes the distinction as real-time explicit customization (SearchWiki) versus long-term explicit (My SurfCanyon), but you don’t have to follow his terminology to see that SurfCanyon sounds easier.”

Jean-Marie Gall, a prominent technology blogger in France, added this:

“v2.0.0 is truly bursting with efficiency…  Congratulations to… Surf Canyon for all the remarkable work on this marvelous plug-in that I’ve been using since it launched.”

Update (12/17/08) – Vanessa Voltolina at FOLIO: magazine also covered the launch of v2.

Personalized Internet Search Gets Smarter

Surf Canyon Version 2.0 Released

OAKLAND, CALIF. December 9, 2008 – Today Surf Canyon released version 2.0 of its popular search enhancement application, which uses patents-pending technology to transform the standard, static search engine page into a collection of targeted results that dynamically respond to users’ actions in real time.

With over one trillion unique URLs currently active on the web, technology that automatically personalizes and improves the precision of search engine results in real time meets a fundamental need for faster, easier and more effective searching. Since its release in February 2008, over 400,000 people have downloaded the Surf Canyon software.

v2.0 features explicit personalization, available through http://my.SurfCanyon.com, which allows users to both specify preferred domains and block domains they dislike. Pages from preferred domains are automatically moved up in the Surf Canyon-enhanced list of search results and pages from disliked domains are removed. No longer are searchers required to contend with generic “one size fits all” search engine responses.

The new version also offers enhanced performance and advanced search personalization algorithms that further improve users’ search experiences. A new “Odometer” will furthermore offer a metric, called “Search Boost,” designed to help users understand the “mileage” and value they’re getting from Surf Canyon.

“We’re constantly refining our search technology to enable increasingly accurate inferences of searchers’ ‘at the moment’ intent, but our basic philosophy hasn’t changed: deliver real value, integrate transparently into the search experience, and require no learning curve or effort whatsoever on the part of our users,” said Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon.

Surf Canyon works with the most popular search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Craigslist, and integrates seamlessly into Firefox and Internet Explorer. Surf Canyon has been a Featured Download at popular technology review site Lifehacker.com, is currently on Mozilla’s list of “Recommended Add-ons” (an honor bestowed on a mere 1½% of the 2500+ available) and is recognized by DEMO.com as an “Innovator to Watch.”

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For further information, contact:
Steven Blinn
BlinnPR
212-675-4777

About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patent-pending Discovery Engine for Search™ transforms result pages from lists of static links into dynamic knowledge resources, enabling users to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among all the irrelevant results, significantly accelerating the search process. The company is headquartered in Oakland, CA and was founded in 2006. For more information please visit www.SurfCanyon.com.

On December 11th, Mike Wertheim, our Chief Architect, will be participating on the “Lessons learned developing add-ons for multiple platforms” panel at Add-on-Con, the first ever conference dedicated to the building and Marketing of Add-ons.

Update (12/23/08) – Surf Canyon was happy to co-sponsor the after-party.

Update (12/29/08) – The video of Mike Wertheim’s panel discussion is now available.

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 most useful techniques for comparing the quality of search engine retrieval functions is the technique of result interleaving, invented by Thorsten Joachims of Cornell University. He first introduced the idea in a 2002 paper and has since recently expanded on the idea.

A search engine retrieval function is an algorithm that produces a ranked list of documents given a document collection and a user query. The retrieval function is the secret sauce behind the search engine. It is reported that Google, for instance, considers over 200 different document features when ranking web pages in response to a user query. These features are fed into the retrieval function which tells the web application which links to present and it what order.  In an open collection, such as the World Wide Web, different retrieval functions can produce both different document orderings as well as entirely different sets of documents.

Joachims came up with a very simple test that answers the following question: Given two retrieval functions, which does a search engine user prefer? His idea was that one can interleave the results of the two retrieval functions in an unbiased fashion and then count the user clicks on the links contributed by each retrieval function. The better retrieval function is the one that gets the most clicks.

For instance, assume that we have four documents (A, B, C, and D) that are relevant to a given query. According to the first retrieval function, r1, they should be ordered C-A-D-B. According to the second retrieval function, r2, they should be ordered D-A-C-B. The interleaved order of presentation would be D-C-A-B half the time and C-D-A-B half the time. We need to assure that each retrieval function gets to determine the document in the top spot half the time in order to have an unbiased test.  We would then show these document lists to many users as they conduct searches for this query. If we found that there were more user clicks on document C compared to document D, we can state that users prefer retrieval function r1. We can repeat this test for more documents and more queries, but by simply counting the clicks on documents contributed by each retrieval function we can determine an absolute user preference.

We implemented this test to compare our retrieval function, which employs real-time personalization based on implicit relevance feedback, with Google’s retrieval function. We always show the user the top 10 Google results, even with our application installed, so our interleaving test was only done when users asked for a second page of search results. In those cases, the results presented to the user would be a mixture of results 11 through 15 from Google and the most highly ranked personalized results from our retrieval function.

The figure below shows the ratio of link clicks on dynamically ranked results compared to Google results as a function of the number of search results selected by the searcher before preceding to the second page of results. A ratio less than 1.0 would indicate that they prefer un-personalized Google results, whereas a ratio greater than 1.0 would indicate a preference for our retrieval algorithm. A ratio of 1.0 would indicate no user preference. Note that the users do not know if they are selecting personalized or un-personalized links. The result is a very clear preference for our retrieval algorithm – users are 30-40% more likely to select dynamically ranked links.

We looked at this quantity versus the number of search results selected because the user’s interactions with the search page are what we use to personalize the results. The more the user selects, the more confident we are about the user’s true intent. Interestingly, users also prefer dynamically ranked results, by a significant margin, even when they skip the top 10 Google links entirely. When a user skips a link, we generally assume that the document is not what the user wanted. If the user skips all 10 links, we assume that the search engine misinterpreted the user intent and we start looking for different content that is not represented in the top 10 links.

Even though only 10% of searchers ever venture beyond page 1, we consider a 30-40% improvement in page 2 click-through rates to be significant. Quantitatively measuring the value delivered by real-time implicit personalization to page 1 results is, unfortunately, considerably more difficult. Nevertheless, be believe that these page 2 results are indicative of the value that real-time implicit personalization can delivery to page 1 results as well.

Update (7/15/09) – Our research paper, “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback,” was selected for oral presentation at SIGIR ’09.

Update (12/18/09) – Our research paper was published by SIGIR.

Yesterday Google began its roll-out of SearchWiki and Surf Canyon’s v1.1.6 was only a few hours behind.

When logged into Google, SearchWiki enables users to personalize their individual search pages by “promoting” results to the top  and “removing” results from the page by clicking icons. The latest version of our real-time implicit personalization application is now compatible with the explicit user customization offered by SearchWiki. Results that are “promoted” take their nested recommendations with them, as do results that are “removed.”

Update (11/24/08) – Darrell Etherington at Web Worker Daily, writing a post about the new SearchWiki, coincidentally enough also has Surf Canyon installed, which he describes as a:

“very handy results mining Firefox extension.”

Since Surf Canyon was introduced to Mozilla’s download page back in May we have received a number of user reviews. Here is a sampling of some of the best ones:

Surf Canyon finds links Google misses

by Bob S on October 17, 2008

There are a batch of Google “enhancers” and they work somewhat– but if you’re researching projects, data, etc. Surf Canyon goes a step further. I had been researching something and was frustrated by the search engines out there. Time after time I got the same results until I weeks later I discovered Surf Canyon. I didn’t expect much, but was surprised. I had the same search criteria and found things that were “skipped” before. I highly recommend it.

Amazing time saver

by locorss on September 22, 2008

this plugin is the best thing to happen to search since google, since it filters and helps dig things pages down that might be relevant. this is motly for those users that don’t like going down to page two and beyond in the results.

by Roy Wildon on September 22, 2008

I’ve been using Surf Canyon for months now. It saves a lot of search time and cuts through extraneous matches. It works seamlessly with Google, enhancing queie success. Higly recommend that you use this.

by lazdsl on September 17, 2008

simple and practical very nice !

Great

by Daniel Müller on September 11, 2008

Great Tool! After having spend a bunch of time while searching the right stuff for my phd-thesis, this tool reduces time, money and a lot of worries! This tool is a must for every single google user! THX

by TakeYellow on September 7, 2008

great one

Works in FF3

by Harvey108 on August 13, 2008

I tried Surf Canyon in FF3 with Yahoo and Google search pages and they both work well. I may report back after several weeks of use with more details. At first I could not use the Surf Canyon Assistant but then I found, with the assistance of Surf Canyon developers, that my admuncher was blocking the program. We had to put it on a white list in admuncher and now the Surf Canyon works in Google.

Fantastic Add-On

by Luciano Mauro on August 8, 2008

Surf Canyon was fantastic, it did a great job of refining my search and saving me valuable time. Great job!

by Wish13 on August 8, 2008

Excellent search tool – finds more relevent results. Ideal for research or people who use the search engines a lot. Highly recommended.

Very Useful

by pm55 on July 30, 2008

My first impressions on using this is that it is a “first class” add-on. It is worth trying if you do much searching. Thank you so very much for creating it!

by tarndt on July 9, 2008

Definitely improves Google results. Extremely useful – couldn’t live without it anymore – and I am making this statement after using it for only one week!

Great search tool!

by JRyley on July 3, 2008

Surf Canyon is an excellent addition to search. I find the relevance of it’s results extremely helpful. In a search world where results on the first page are crucial, this is also beneficial to companies whose results are on lower pages. Nice work, Surf Canyon!

by Sarai18 on June 24, 2008

Great add-on, great support, too!

Running SC in an academic setting

by Michael Flower on June 24, 2008

I’ve just recently discovered Surf Canyon and I have already come to appreciate its value as an aid when using the web for my research and curriculum projects at Portland State University. I will be recommending it to my colleagues and students.

by Sou Saeteurn on June 19, 2008

Surf Canyon is awesome. It helps me save a lot of time on research. Highly recommended. Keep up the good work.

Complemento ideal para Google

by Iván Lasso on June 17, 2008

Sin duda, esta extensión es excelente para complementar cualquier tipo de búsqueda en Google, pero sobre todo aquellas especialmente intrincadas. Si ya ponerse a navegar “al tun tun” podría hacer que te embarques en un viaje de horas, Surf Canyon podría extenderlo hasta en días, ayudándote a descubrir cosas interesantes a partir de los enlaces que habrás. Son extensiones como éstas las que consiguen que Firefox sea el mejor navegador de hoy en día. Completamente imprescindible.

[Google’s translation: Without doubt, this extension is an excellent complement to any search on Google, but especially those especially intricate. If you already navigate “to tun tun” might make you embark on a journey of hours, Surf Canyon could extend up in days, helping you to discover interesting things from the links you may have. They are extensions as they get to the Firefox browser is the best today. Absolutely indispensable.]

by Userbot on June 9, 2008

Surf Canyon is non-invasive, doesn’t slow anything down, and you won’t notice it’s there until you need it. Excellent tool.

by Mohammed-Alzubi on June 7, 2008

Exactly what i’m looking for, I just did a search on Google and the piece of information I needed was on Page 6 !!!, I don’t think I’ve ever made it to page 6. Thanks Surf Canyon for a great tool.

Surf Canyon offers new way of search and browsing the web

by geekycoder geekycoder on May 14, 2008

After installing this plug-in, I find that it offers a great way to explore search result without going from page to page. Everything is done within the same page, and you might just find some interesting related search link when you explore on the search result further. Yes, Surf Canyon generate its own set of high quality search result to complement those of the search engine.

No user interface is perfect but this truly offers a convenient and innovative ways of viewing results without replacing the powerful search engine we love.

I have written a review at http://geekycoder.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/reviewweb-expand-the-web-through-surf-canyon/

In our last press release we revealed that Professor Michael Flower of Interdisciplinary Science Studies at Portland State University has become addicted to Surf Canyon and, as such, has begun recommending the application to his students.

Now we learn that Professor Pawel Frelik of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, has added Surf Canyon, along with Cuil, PowerSet and Hakia (we’re on a panel with Hakia at the Fourth Annual Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit in a couple of weeks), to the curriculum for his course on New Media Methodology. The course, co-designed and taught by Ms. Beata Marczynska-Fedorowicz as part of their new Master of Arts Program, aims at familiarizing students with available technologies which can be used in the humanities as well as at developing strategies of information retrieval and storage that are precisely suitable for people in the arts.

According to Professor Frelik:

“Searching for and finding relevant information is one of the holy grails of the Internet. While standard search engines offer sufficient result quality for casual users, those who wish to power-search and save time have to look for more specialized tools. SurfCanyon is exactly one of those and the recommendation it offers are always very valuable.”

Angela Gunn at BetaNews gives an explanation and review of Surf Canyon:

“The results are cleanly presented, and the recent addition of categories within results helps users to understand what the plug-in thinks you’re seeking… results were intriguingly focused, and in a research situation SurfCanyon excels at winnowing the less-than-helpful.”

Update (11/3/08) – Tim Conneally at BetaNews also mentions Surf Canyon in an article about semantic search plug-in SemantiFind.