Joel Evans at Geek.com provides an excellent example of how Surf Canyon enables users to find relevant, and often essential, information that the otherwise might have missed. In the middle of his post regarding getting Entourage to work with the iPhone, he explains:

“I never would have figured this out on my own and thanks to Google I stumbled on this link while searching for ‘import ics to entourage’. Thanks also to Surf Canyon since I saw this result but normally it would have been buried on page 13 of my Google results.”

We’re pleased to announce that today Mozilla approved our Firefox extension, which is now available to the general public on addons.Mozilla.org.

Surf Canyon’s Chief Scientist, David Hardtke, Ph.D., participated in a panel discussion at Alternative Search Engines Day. The topic of the panel was “Users First: Give them WHAT they want, the WAY they want (and need).” Also on the panel were Jaideep Singh of Spock, Siva Kumar or TheFind, and Rob Rustad of Collarity. The panel was moderated by Gerd Zobel of Healthpricer and focused on creating a better search experience for the user.

Each company represented has a unique improvement to the conventional user search experience. Collarity improves the user experience by finding subgroups with the web site audience and tailoring content to theses subgroups. TheFind is a shopping site that improves the user experience by having a rich user interface and by having the deepest product catalog in many areas (over 220 million items are in their database). Spock focuses on one of the more difficult verticals within search (people). Spock utilizes both user generated content and vertical specific tagging techniques to improve the search experience.

Surf Canyon was unique at Alternative Search Engines Day in that we were to only company represented that is developing technology for the general horizontal search market, although our technology can greatly enhance vertical search engines as well.

The participants at ASE day are nominally competitors, the theme of the day was cooperation. Collectively, alternative search engines represent a mere 1.7% of the search market. The private discussions during the breaks proved to be enlightening as we were able to freely talk about the common challenges facing alternative search technologies.

Largest amongst these challenges is getting people to use “alternative” search products. Many of the participants were content to be “second click” search engines that collect traffic from the major search engines and help users in specific verticals. None of the people with whom we spoke had yet figured out how to generate recurring traffic without the major search engines acting as a gateway. Everyone in the room, however, agreed that providing a superior user experience over the major search engines is the necessary prerequisite for widespread consumer adoption.

Above: David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist at Surf Canyon, speaks at the Alternative Search Engines Day Conference.

Hoyun Kim at Popgadget touches a current frustration with search:

“More and more, it seems that what comes up at the top in browser search results is determined by factors having little to do with what I’m really looking for… what I’m looking for may be buried so deep that I’ll never find [it].”

And, naturally, one of the solutions:

“… after a few weeks, I’m finding that I use [Surf Canyon] all the time. It helps that the bull’s eye icons are easy to ignore, and don’t interrupt or slow down the flow of pages or change the look of search results. The bull’s eyes are there subtly reminding you that when you get to a link that looks relevant enough to click, you can use that as a starting point to narrow your search and bring things up from way, way below.”

Arun Radhakrishnan at the Search Engine Journal also conducted a little Q&A with Surf Canyon.

Surf Canyon recently had the opportunity to demonstrate its product at a couple of forums in San Francisco. The first was at the March Geek Out on the 12th hosted by SF New Tech. The audience seemed to think we did a pretty good job. The second was at SF Beta on April 1st. Rebecca Reeve at bub.blicio.us has some nice coverage:

“Their simple, easy-to-understand product returns better search results … based on your actions.”

Above: At SF Beta, Kristen explains how post-query disambiguation using real-time implicit behavior signals accelerates the search process.

Below: At SF New Tech, David and Mark give a live demonstration of the product to a packed house.

We recently pushed out the latest version of our Discovery Engine for Search.™ Our version page has the details of the additional features, however, Kristen Nicole at Mashable does a great job of explaining what’s new.

Cesar Brea posts some insightful comments on his blog, Octavianworld:

“The weakest link here is … being dependent on users structuring their search queries so as to accurately depict their objective as otherwise the in-context Ads will be as useless to the user as the search results. Such a requirement is taxing for the user and better alternatives will be introduced into that market space over time.”

He goes on to explain how Surf Canyon is one such alternative. Meanwhile, Aaron Pava, at CivicActions, offered the following:

“Surf Canyon, one of my favorite search add-ons to improve Google search, auto-updated today – reminding me that I’ve been meaning to share this for the Way We Work.”

Natalya put together a CEO profile for AltSearchEngines.

Joel Evans, Chief Geek of Geek.com, today made Surf Canyon a “Geek Pick” and had this to say:

“This is a must-have plug-in… I tend to use Google for the majority of my searching, and this tool breathed new life into the experience.”

Ernst-Jan Pfauth, Editor and Chief of The Next Web, and not necessarily a geek, had this to say yesterday in his article entitled “France loves search personalization service Surf Canyon”:

“Apart from it’s new approach on search personalization, I also like the international mindset of Cramer and his team. Most US-based start-ups just focus on the huge home market, yet Surf Canyon works in 13 different languages.”

Surf Canyon was recently selected as one of five companies for the Search Engine Strategies Search Engine Panel in New York City on March 20th.