Lifehacker Japan recently wrote about Surf Canyon. While the technology wasn’t explicitly developed for Japanese, it does work in many different languages, so it’s great to see that it’s delivering value. Here are some translated bits:

“Surf Canyon… adds a new dimension to the search results… If the results include something close to what you’re looking for, digging it gives you a feeling of pulling the information closer to you… While it sometimes gives recommendations that are off the mark, it can give you exactly what you wanted without going through pages of search results.”

A couple of sites in China have also given us reviews. Weborn.org, according to a computer translation, had this to say:

“Surf Canyon personalizes your search results making them more intelligent.”

Rainy-bow, thanks to another computer translation, had this to say:

 “Surf Canyon lets you search smarter.”

Here’s a screen shot from the Rainy-bow website of Surf Canyon working in Chinese:

Surf Canyon recently reached some significant milestones which we shared in this press release:

400,000 People Find Just What They Are Looking For With Surf Canyon

 Smart Real-time Personalization Technology Accelerates Web Search

OAKLAND, CALIF. October 21, 2008 – Since its release in February, over 400,000 people seeking more precise search results have downloaded Surf Canyon’s free application at www.SurfCanyon.com. Using technology to determine the searcher’s “at the moment” intent, the technology continually refines relevancies and rankings in response to user actions. It’s similar to a virtual assistant that instantly sorts through slews of generalized results to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. As such, more than 20 million queries were handled in the last quarter.

“400,000 downloads is only just the beginning, but we’re very pleased with the early rate of adoption as well as the efficacy of the application and user retention,” said Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon. “This was by no means an easy technology to develop, so after 2½ years of hard work it’s incredibly gratifying to see how well it is doing.”

Surf Canyon works with the major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search — and Craigslist. Users don’t need to fire up a separate application or window to use Surf Canyon as the technology integrates into the browser. Real-time personalized results are then displayed underneath the standard search results right on the web page being viewed.

The technology has been popular with universities. “I’ve been using Surf Canyon for the past four months and have become so addicted to the re-ranking functionality that it bothers me whenever I’m on a machine that doesn’t have it installed,” said Michael Flower, Professor of Interdisciplinary Science Studies at Portland State University. “The value of this application for web-assisted research is so important that I’ve begun recommending it to all of my students.”

Surf Canyon has been a Featured Download at popular technology review site Lifehacker.com, is currently on Mozilla.org’s list of “Recommended Add-Ons,” for Firefox (an honor bestowed on a mere 1½% of the 2500+ available add-ons) and is recognized by DEMO.com as an “Innovator to Watch.” Surf Canyon has also been recommended as a research tool in ComputerWorld’s short list of “School 2.0” essentials and has received glowing reviews across the web.

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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.

Today we released the latest version of our application.

The big, new feature, which some of you might already have seen recently, is “Categories”. While similar to clustering, these Categories are based on real-time actions and will help you to “drill down” on your search through a better understanding of your “at the moment” intent.

Additionally, the update includes other minor fixes and enhancements, including correcting an issue with some types of Google links.

Update (10/23/08) – Jean-Marie Gall, one of our fans from France, returned to spread the word of the recent release. We’ve taken the liberty of translating his feedback in the comments:

“From the moment Surf Canyon was installed on my laptop, always happy, never any worries, I could not do without it given how much I’m used to it for my research…”

Christophe Deschamps at Outils Froids had this to say while announcing both the new version of Inquisitor and Surf Canyon:

“Inquisitor accelerates your informational researches (but Surf Canyon does it even better)”

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 is to thus prove this statement, quantify the improvements and use the data that we gather to improve our application even further.

Quantifying the “web search experience” is, however, very challenging. Nevertheless, search engines are constantly running small (and large) experiments to test how changes affect the user search experience. These experiments, which often use something called “A/B” or “bucket” testing, entail exposing a small, randomly selected set of users to the new features or changes and then comparing their behavior to the behavior of users on the baseline search site. Depending on the feature being tested, different user behavior signals are used to judge user satisfaction with the changes.

Since our technology radically changes the nature of the search results page, evaluating the application is particularly difficult. Once a user installs our browser application, the search engine results page becomes dynamic and personalized to each user. Users who install our application expect to get our technology, so a traditional bucket test is not possible. (If we were to have a control sample of users who installed a special version of our application that did not personalize their search results, those users would be perplexed and would probably uninstall the product.)

However, we performed a thorough evaluation of the technology using some traditional evaluation metrics from the Information Retrieval community as well as some new evaluation techniques that we invented ourselves. These evaluations are documented in a research paper which we recently drafted. In a subsequent blog post, we will detail our evaluation methodologies and the conclusions of these studies.

A good presentation should naturally start with the conclusions, so we reveal here in advance the conclusion of our studies so far: real-time personalization works.

Update (12/1/08) – Continued in Part 2.

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.

Mark Gibbs at Network World recently evaluated our application and had this to say in his article entitled “Surf Canyon improves search…really”:

“In use, Surf Canyon is very pleasantly discrete and for the first week or so you’ll probably forget to use it. Even so, eventually you’ll start clicking on the bullseye logos and you’ll get hooked. Exactly how the service works isn’t spelled out in any detail, but this is definitely a case where explaining the product doesn’t work very well and where using the product is the proof. Surf Canyon (no, I have no idea why it is called that) is free and definitely worth using.”

For what it’s worth, “Surf” comes from “surfing the internet” and “Canyon” implies how the application digs “deep” into the search results to find relevant information.

Update (10/13/2008) – Jason Meserve at Network World today published this interview with Surf Canyon CEO Mark Cramer.

Surf Canyon was recently selected to present at two prestigious conferences.

The first is the Fourth Annual Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit to be held at the Montage Resort & Spa in Laguna Beach on November 11th and 12th. Mark Cramer will be speaking on the “Searching for the Future” panel with Hakia, to be moderated by Gene Munster, Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray, who previously had this to say about Surf Canyon:

“After having spent time analyzing Surf Canyon’s product, we believe that, because of its ability to quickly and easily enable users to locate relevant information that might otherwise have been impossible to find, real-time personalization represents a significant next step in the evolution of search.”

Also, after the editors and readers of VentureWire voted for the start-ups they view as the most innovative and promising in the technology industry today, Surf Canyon was selected to be among 125 presenting companies at the VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City on November 18th and 19th.

Update (11/14/08) – Laurie Sullivan at OnlineMedia Daily wrote a piece on the Piper Jaffray panel discussion.

Today we’re proud to announce Surf Canyon’s inclusion in the BOSS Mashable Challenge:

“The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer to compete for the grand prize of $2,000 and an article on Mashable about your winning entry. How do you win?  Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies.”

Update (10/7/08) – Surf Canyon has made it to the voting round!Click the link and select your favorite entry.

Update (10/14/08) – Congratulations on KallOut and social mention for taking 1st and 2nd place, respectively!

Richard Martin at InformationWeek, writing for Internet Evolution, put together “The Big Report” entitled “The Right Search Tool” on advances in the search industry. The article is also available on page 35 of the September 29th edition of InformationWeek. Here are the bits that concern Surf Canyon, which was one of the select companies profiled:

At-work surfers (assuming they’re actually working and not looking for the latest Gnarls Barkley video) “are not just exploring and experiencing things on the Web,” says Surf Canyon founder Mark Cramer. “Their objective is more specific, and they need to get it in a more timely fashion.”

… there are new tools that aren’t really search engines at all. Often these come embedded in other types of applications. Launched in February, Surf Canyon is a browser extension that uses “semantic real-time implicit personalization” to sort results from the large search engines and pull the most relevant to the fore. Surf Canyon watches and learns from user behavior signals to calculate “instantaneous relevancies” to select the most useful needles from a mountainous haystack of search results.

“Like many innovations, the concept was born out of frustration,” CEO Mark Cramer says of Surf Canyon’s tool.

The next day, bulletins-electroniques.com, the largest international technology watch service coming from the global network of French Embassy Scientific Services, had this to say:

“In practice, Surf Canyon quickly proved to be indispensable… even if users do not understand how Surf Canyon treats the pages (trade secrets oblige), they get results more relevant than before.”

Update (12/15/08) – Information Week in China also ran this article.

Over the past month, Mark Cramer has been interviewed on the subject of Surf Canyon by a number of radio stations around the country. You may listen here:

July 31st – WICC in Bridgeport, CT

August 14th – Tron Simpson of KCMN-AM in Colorado Springs, CO and WHIP Charlotte, NC

August 20th – WCSM in Dayton, OH

August 21st – WCSR in Lansing, MI

Also, on July 15th, Mark spoke was interviewed by Katja Schaer for Radio Suiss Romand’s Journal du Matin (in French). The topic of discussion was the launch of Cuil.

Scott Blitstein at Web Worker Daily gives a very nice review of Surf Canyon. In particular, he had this to say:

“I guess the way I know that Surf Canyon is useful to me is that I notice the lack of the bullseye on machines where it isn’t installed. I don’t realize how much I use it, but in a short period of time it has become a part of my search process and I find I miss the functionality it brings when it isn’t available.”