Kaila Colbin, who blogs for VortexDNA, had some very flattering comments in a MediaPost Search Insider article entitled “Speculating in (Online) Real Estate”:

“I love this idea [Surf Canyon] for a few reasons. It fits neatly into what the user is already doing at the time: no upskilling or behavioral change necessary. It integrates beautifully with the existing real estate. It offers something of genuine value to the consumer.

I don’t know if Surf Canyon is making any money off its plug-in, but its approach exemplifies what made Google so successful: delivering what people want, when and how they want it.”

In our continuing entirely unscientific look at the search result pages for the presidential candidates, we now turn our attention to the presumptive nominee for the Republican party. John McCain has joked that he uses Google during his search for a running mate, so let’s take a look at what we find when we search for him.

If the “Hillary Clinton” search results that we reviewed a month ago could be considered “on message,” with many of her official sites lined up on page 1 and only one mishap on the first two pages (position #16), then John McCain has got an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem. It doesn’t help either, we imagine, that some people have deployed “Google bombs” to sabotage his results. The outcome, however, consists of three panics in a row on the very first page of results and two Google bombs on the second. Furthermore, the top 100 results are filled with far fewer “official” sites (24 vs 10).

Below we take a light-hearted look at the top 100 results for “John McCain” on Google. We added the “bomb” icons to the results based strictly on information from a Search Engine Land post, however, it’s entirely possible that, unknown to us, there were people bombing Hillary Clinton’s results as well.

(Note: the “bomb” results are perhaps considered as such not necessarily because of the political stance, but because of the perceived unfavorable slant with which the stance is portrayed.)

Now you’ll be asked to forgive us for demonstrating how our application makes all of this searching stuff better.

With almost 40 million results for John McCain, most of which are probably not relevant to your specific needs, how could you hope to dig through them all? Certainly you could page, page, page, or reformulate your query, but all of this is hard work. Fortunately, Surf Canyon has developed a search application to do the heavy lifting for you.

After you install the software, when you enter a search on one of your favorite search engines (currently Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and Craigslist) small bull’s eyes will appear next to each result. Click a bull’s eye next to the result you like, or the result itself for that matter, and Surf Canyon will figure out what you’re looking for and then dig deep into the result set (up to page 100!) and find what you need.

Here’s a quick example of what might happen if, using the search above, you click on result #2 (John McCain 2008…) and then the 3rd result recommended by Surf Canyon (McCain Agrees With Bush’s Remarks on Appeasement…):

Once again, with virtually no effort at all, relevant results, based on your actions as you search, are pulled out of the result set. If you would like this to happen for you, download and enjoy our search application.

Please let us know how did! Stay tuned for more…

This handy feature has been around for a few weeks, but it’s worth pointing out now. Ever wish there was an easy way to email results you find directly off search results page? Wish no more!

Next to every search result Surf Canyon has added an “Email This” link (indicated by the red circles below) that, when clicked, will open up your email client and load up the result for easy delivery. Simply enter the email addresses of whoever you like and press “Send.”

Important Note: Surf Canyon does not collect email addresses and will never spam. We loathe spam. As a matter of fact, unless you put Surf Canyon on copy, we can’t even know your email address, the addresses of the recipients or even that you sent the email.

John Shinal at Vator.tv sat down with Mark Cramer to discuss Surf Canyon. Charles Knight, at Alt Search Engines, who never misses anything, also posted the interview.

See this video on Vator.tv »

Update (6/23/08) – Vator.tv posted the 2nd half of the internet.

See this video on Vator.tv »

Anthony Ha at VentureBeat helped us announce the latest version, and first major upgrade, of Surf Canyon.

v1.1.0 for Firefox includes support for the release version of Firefox 3 and both the Internet Explorer and Firefox extensions are now integrated with Craigslist. When searching through classified listings on Craigslist, in addition to benefiting from Surf Canyon’s real-time relevancy calculations that pull forward pertinent results, displayed as “recommendations,” users can get “preview” images of the listings on the results page, as depicted below. Both of these enhancements provide an enhanced search experience while trying to find the apartment, automobile or knick-knack desired. (If Surf Canyon recommends your future spouse, please let us know.)

Above: Screen shot of Surf Canyon “recommending” a laptop on Craigslist.

The Preferences menu (under the “Tools” drop-down) has also been updated to enable turning the Craigslist integration on and off as well as adding the preview images.

Above: Screen shot of new “Preferences” menu.

Jean-Marie Gall, from France, had this to say about the update:

“Frankly, I could not do without Surf Canyon…”

Less than one month after being “approved” by Mozilla, we’re thrilled to announce that our extension has been added to their list of “recommended add-ons,” an honor bestowed to a mere 3% of those available. Drew Olanoff at Download Squad picked up the news with the following:

“When we saw Surf Canyon, we figured it was just another search add-on. It was obvious after installing it and searching around on Google for about 3 minutes that we were wrong… This is one to watch.”

Above: Screen shot of Surf Canyon as a “recommended” add-on on Mozilla.org. We added the circle.

Update (6/6/08): Today Mozilla added Surf Canyon to the rotation for the top slot on their add-on home page!

Above: Screen shot of Surf Canyon in the top position on Mozilla’s add-on home page. No circle required.

Or, more precisely, what’s hiding in the search results for “Hillary Clinton”?

How to Find the Needles in Your Search Results Haystack

Enter a search for “Hillary Clinton” on your favorite search engine and the top results will often be bland, official stuff. So where’s the beef?

Few people will bother to venture past the first results page. It’s simply too much work. Nevertheless, given the enormity of information available on the internet, one has to imagine that there’s a lot more good information out there, sometimes the most juicy stuff. Turns out, it’s true!

Below we do the hard work for you and take a look at the top 100 results returned by Google for “Hillary Clinton.” While one person’s “hidden treasure” is another person’s buried garbage, it’s instructive to see how much potentially relevant information there is beyond the first page.

With millions of search results, what’s the best way to get at what you need?

If you’d like to quickly and easily access the buried treasure in your search results, download Surf Canyon and give it a try! You could manually go page by page, or have Surf Canyon do the work for you. We’ve automated the process of digging into the search results to make searching faster and more enjoyable

Here’s an example of the “Recommendations” Surf Canyon will retrieve, for the same query above, based on the user’s interest in result #2:

With virtually no effort, relevant and interesting information is dug out of the results.

Congratulations on getting this far! Please tell us how we did (below).

Stay tuned for more…

Update (6/27/08): “John McCain” gets a similar treatment.

TechCrunch and VentureBeat both broke the news a couple of weeks ago, but today the official press release went out over the wire:

Surf Canyon Receives Seed Funding for Search Application

Surf Canyon’s innovative technology accelerates the search process, enables searchers to find relevant information buried among results

OAKLAND, CALIF. May 28, 2008 – Surf Canyon today announced the close of its initial seed round of financing. $600,000 in funding was received from prominent investors and business executives in San Francisco, New England, Paris and London. The proceeds will be used for continued development of the company’s Discovery Engine for Search™, an application (available for Internet Explorer and Firefox at www.SurfCanyon.com) that accelerates the search process on Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live.

“I met the founders of Surf Canyon in March and am extremely impressed with both the team and their vision for transforming search,” said Tom Brackett, a seed round participant and angel investor from Connecticut. “After using the product for an extended period of time, I am also astounded by the extent to which it improves the search experience.”

“We’re thrilled at the support received from our investors,” said Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon. “These funds enable a number of new possibilities and we’re looking forward to executing on our strategy, which will include expanding the team and launching a Marketing campaign designed to introduce the product to more users.”

Understanding user intent is one of the principal challenges of information retrieval. When there were only tens or hundreds of millions of items on the internet, relying on comparatively fuzzy notions of intent derived from two- and three-word queries was largely sufficient. Now that the major search engines index tens of billions of items, however, it has become increasingly difficult, if not mathematically impossible, to effectively match these queries with the available content. Thus, in order to produce relevant results, more information regarding the user’s intent is required. Surf Canyon alleviates this problem by extracting insight from post-query behavior signals, as the search is being conducted, and then exploiting the intelligence immediately to enable users to find relevant information buried in the result set.

According to Gene Munster, a Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray who specializes in Internet and Digital Media, “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.”

About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-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. Surf Canyon has headquarters in Oakland, California and is recognized by DEMO.com as an “Innovator to Watch.”

Our Chief Scientist, David Hardtke, Ph.D., enters into a friendly conversation with Exalead on AltSearchEngines regarding the merits and limitations of both explicit and implicit personalization.

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has made Surf Canyon one of its Featured Downloads.

GeekyCoder has also posted a nice review, including the following:

“Simple concept with huge potential to be the Next Big Thing… Overall, Surf Canyon deserves to be a indispensable toolkit to any serious web surfer who looking for high quality search merge with better user experience.”

Finally, Pandia Search Engine News offers some observations:

Is it any good? Many plug-ins that are supposed to help you do the exact opposite by being a nuisance. SurfCanyon isn’t intrusive… So you can forget all about it until next time you get annoyed at the enormous amount of search results presented by Google and the total absence of any tools for refining your search… With SurfCanyon, you can add a handy tool for improving your search results.