Vanessa Voltolina at FOLIO: Magazine posted an article this morning announcing the release of Brand Thunder and Surf Canyon’s latest joint project: The Columbus Dispatch’s Browser Theme.

While Surf Canyon personalizes the search results so that content from The Columbus Dispatch is given priority, Brand Thunder customizes the entire browser experience. In addition to visually enhancing the browser with shots of the Columbus skyline or The ‘Shoe, users will now be able to effortlessly access Dispatch news and content through links in the top of the browser as well as a side bar that may be opened and closed.

Together the two applications offer readers of The Columbus Dispatch unprecedented control over the information coming through the browser as well as being delivered by the major search engines.

Here is Brand Thunder’s press release:

Brand Thunder and Columbus Dispatch Deliver First Daily Newspaper Browser Experience

COLUMBUS, OH — August 19, 2009 — Brand Thunder LLC (http://www.brandthunder.com), the custom browser specialists, announced today the availability of the Columbus Dispatch Boom!. The first product of its kind to serve the audience of a daily newspaper, this browser add-on is designed to strengthen relationships and enhance loyalty between The Columbus Dispatch and its readers and subscribers.

The Dispatch Boom, available at http://www.dispatch.com, customizes the user’s Internet experience by enabling seamless and fast access to Dispatch news stories and content. Users will find links to key sections in the paper, a newsreader and a sidebar with news summaries for the Buckeyes and Blue Jackets plus tools for reaching The Dispatch and managing subscriptions. It also features the Surf Canyon search enhancement to help users find Dispatch coverage of news and events. Any search for news terms, regardless of the search service being used, will return Dispatch stories at the top of the results page helping users to quickly find their paper’s coverage of a story. The Boom! offers two distinct looks: one with a view of the Columbus skyline and the other with a look into the ‘Shoe, Ohio State University’s football stadium.

“There’s strong appeal to reading the morning paper and there’s an equally strong desire for the immediacy of news over the Internet,” said Phil Pikelny, Vice President for Dispatch Digital & Chief Marketing Officer at The Dispatch Printing Company. “A Brand Thunder custom browser is a great way for our readers to stay informed when online.”

“The browser offers several ways to get breaking news to users, which makes it ideal for a newspaper and its readers,” said Patrick Murphy, founder and CEO of Brand Thunder, noting that Dispatch.com is the No. 1 local Web site in the Columbus market. “We’re happy to serve our hometown paper which we hope will be only the first among many newspapers to offer this exciting software to their readers and subscribers.”

Brand Thunder’s browser Booms! are free, lightweight, active customizations that can include themes, toolbars, sidebars and other content or functionality.

About Brand Thunder:
Formed in April 2007, Brand Thunder creates custom-browser experiences. Brands enjoy a more persistent connection to their Internet consumer through the custom browser Boom!, which increases website visits and revenue. Through a software installation, end users change the look and feel of their Internet browser into an immersive experience from their favorite sports team, entertainment franchise or Internet site. The custom browser Booms! feature official logos, colors, content and functionality, but can also extend capabilities including video, music players or other Internet widgets. Current business partners and clients include the Huffington Post, Major League Soccer, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL, Universal Music and Yahoo!. Samples found at http://brandthunder.com/gallery/.

Destination Search Engine, SearchBar Enhancements, Updated Algorithm and New Website all Lead to Improved User Experience

OAKLAND, CALIF. August 5, 2009 – Surf Canyon, the popular search application that delivers real-time re-ranking to the major search engines, has released v3.0.0, available for download at www.surfcanyon.com. Since its release in February 2008, over 1 million people have downloaded the application, which has received rave reviews from users and the media.

The most prominent new offering is a destination search engine, found at http://search.SurfCanyon.com. Not only does this search engine enable real-time re-ranking without requiring client software, but it affords Surf Canyon the ability to personalize the first page of results before they are displayed. Furthermore, it employs an updated algorithm that “diversifies” the result set in order to maximize the benefits from re-ranking.

SearchBar integration with the client software was also enhanced. While entering queries into the SearchBar, users will now be presented with not only query refinements but top search results as well, enabling direct navigation without having to visit the search results page. The IE8 version additionally offers website previews next to the SearchBar results.

“Surf Canyon is the expert on personalizing search in real time,” said Tobias Peggs, General Manager at OneRiot, a real-time search engine offering the “pulse” of the web. “We’re thrilled to be part of this release, providing Surf Canyon with real-time search results to compliment those found on traditional search engines.”

Blind studies have shown that Surf Canyon’s patents-pending technology increases the relevancy of search results by up to 40%. Mark Cramer, CEO, recently presented these results regarding the efficacy of real-time re-ranking, detailed in a paper entitled “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback” (http://www.surfcanyon.com/SurfCanyonDemonstrationResearchPaper.pdf), at SIGIR 2009.

Surf Canyon operates with Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Craigslist. During a standard search, as the user makes selections, Surf Canyon’s algorithm determines what information is being sought and then re-ranks the results “on the fly,” digging out relevant information from as deep as page 100.

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For further information, contact:
Steven Blinn
BlinnPR
TEL: (212) 675-4777 or (415) 578-3438
steven@blinnpr.com

About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-pending technology 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.

We’re thrilled to announce the release of v3.0.0! Just shy of two months since our last release, this new version offers some considerable enhancement and major new functionality:

• As reported by Anthony Ha at VentureBeat, we have “resurrected” our destination search engine, located at search.SurfCanyon.com. Not only are searchers now able to test the technology prior to downloading the application, controlling the top 10 results enables an unprecedented level of personalization for real-time re-ranking.
• We have significantly enhanced the SearchBar functionality. In addition to the dropdown Refinements, users will be presented with the top 3 search results to which they can navigate directly without having to visit the SERP. IE8 users will also have the pleasure of seeing image previews, as shown below.
• Craigslist image previews have been “decoupled” from recommendations enabling users to keep the former should they wish to disable the latter.
• Last but not least, www.SurfCanyon.com has received a complete makeover.

Anthony Ha went on to say:

“… suggestions are based on both the result you clicked on and on your behavior during the current search session, which makes it very different from Google’s Similar Pages function, which is based on links — it comes closer to giving you search results that you’re really looking for, rather than forcing you to enter multiple queries as you refine your search.”

With this release, we are recommending that our Firefox users check out BrandThunder’s Canvas Boom, which enables you to customize your Firefox browser using any picture from your computer or the internet. (See below) The download will include Yahoo! Search as the default search engine. Brand Thunder develops all sorts of themes and extensions for Firefox that you can explore in their Gallery. We hope that you enjoy it!

Update: Our good friend, Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines, re-posted the announcement.

On the heals of being mentioned in Professor Marti Hearst’s new book, we’re thrilled to announce that the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval has selected Surf Canyon to present at SIGIR 2009. Considered one of the most important conferences in the field of information retrieval, the event will be in Boston from July 19th-23rd. Mark Cramer, CEO, will be presenting the research paper “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback” at the workshop “Understanding the user – Logging and interpreting user interactions in information search and retrieval.”

During the submission process, one reviewer, an Associate Professor of Computer Science, had this to say:

“The paper presents an empirical evaluation of an algorithm for improving search results from implicit feedback in web search. The algorithm is proprietary, but nevertheless the evaluation is extremely interesting. Unlike most prior work, the evaluation is done on an operational system with real users, and it gives a lot of insight into the benefits of short term personalization. This is a great paper and one of the most interesting IR papers I have read in a while! This paper by itself would already make me come to the workshop. Very interesting, original, and relevant.”

Charles Knight, at Alt Search Engines, followed up with a post.

[Update 12/18/09] – The “Understanding the User: Logging and Interpreting User Interactions in Information Search and Retrieval” workshop report was recently posted on the SIGIR forum. The workshop proceedings, with a link to our research paper, have also been published.

Marti Hearst, Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who previously appraised Surf Canyon in a Technology Review article, recently released her new book, Search User Interfaces. In her sweeping review of the state of the art of search interface design, based on both academic research and deployment in commercial systems, Surf Canyon is honored to be mentioned in chapter 9.2.1, “Personalization in Search:”

“The use of implicit information from viewing of documents described in this section makes use of a user’s interaction history over many query sessions. An alternative is to automatically adjust the rankings in real time, during a single search session. Singh et al., 2008 use a version of the clickthrough inversion idea described in Chapter 5 to re-rank the hits returned for a single query and the user views those results. The terms associated with the links that have been clicked on so far are weighted positively, while those not clicked on are weighted negatively, to provide a real-time re-ranking. A similar idea is being promoted by the startup company SurfCanyon. This can be seen as an implicit version of the explicit re-rankings used in the Google search results personalization interface described above.”

The January 14th edition of the Mossberg Solution column in the Wall Street Journal also compares and contrasts Surf Canyon and Google’s SearchWiki.

Over the past few months there has been considerable discussion regarding Surf Canyon everywhere from Bengaluru to Sarawa, which we’d like to recap.

Wesley Fok with The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest-circulation national newspaper, added Surf Canyon to his short list of “key free apps:”

 “Surf Canyon works on Google, Yahoo and Bing, so no matter your personal taste in search engines, refined search results are but an extension install away.”

Darleen Hartley with the ITExaminer in Bengaluru, India posted an article dedicated to Surf Canyon and entitled, “Personalising your web searches couldn’t be easier or cheaper.” Also, the Chief of the Bibliographic Information at the University of Oviedo had this to say (translated from Spanish) on blogoff.es:

“Some time ago I started using Surf Canyon for improving the results of my search and I am enchanted with this invention… SurfCanyon allows us to recover a large amount of information with simple clicks from the first page, without having to move pages and pages… So the result is happy, wonderful, amazing … Once you use it you get addicted.”

Chuah Kee Man in Kuching/Samarahan, Sarawak chose Surf Canyon to be one of the “Top 10 Super Firefox Addons for Efficient Researchers” on Complicated Simplicity:

 “While Google is often a researcher’s search engine of choice, there are times when you don’t find what you are looking for on Google. For those times, there is Surf Canyon.”

From Italy, 100web2.0 posted this (translated from Italian):

 “The use of the tool is simple… In this way you can get the information you want (for approximations) in a few clicks.”

From the UK, Macworld added Surf Canyon to their list of “The best Mac add-ons for Safari and Firefox:”

“If search results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Craigslist don’t give you the detail you want, Surf Canyon may be the add-on you’ve been looking for.”

Update [8/5/2009] – Pablo Fonseca of La Nación in San José, Costa Rica, had this to say (translated from Spanish):

“I have been trying it for a few days and it has led me to a couple good surprises. I have the slight impression that the program is understanding me and each time carries out better work, offering to me Web pages that are better related to what I’m looking for. I recommend downloading the application and using it for at least a week in order to give it a true opportunity to act.”

Ann Smarty, the new Director of Media for Search & Social at Search Engine Journal, today made Surf Canyon the “Featured Firefox Extension for Search”:

“Surf Canyon is a useful Firefox extension that enhances your web search experience with recommendations based on your preferences.”

Back in November we updated you on some of the feedback we’ve been receiving on AMO (addons.mozilla.org). Since then there’s been a lot of more positive stuff. Here are some of the highlights:

Mac’s Power Tools by Megalomac on June 10, 2009

This is like adding adrenaline to google search. Based upon your searching, it locates extra links that you will probably find useful. You can also add the latest twitter comments based upon your search terms.

Love it!

by PG57Blue on April 15, 2009

As a researcher I love Surf Canyon! I am able to drill down into my searches much faster…..Thanks for the add-on!

by Goodbird on March 30, 2009

Now that Surf Canyon works with WOT on every search, it’s perfect! Thanks Surf Canyon for listening to your users.

by unRheal on March 4, 2009

Awesome idea! Excellent implementation so far, and still room to make this into an even more valuable add-on. Something “G” has failed to implement themselves. Everybody is different – so how could returning the exact same results to a gazillion people be optimal? (trick question)*Definitely* worth checking out, IMHO!

by Se Capitan on January 3, 2009

I’m not one to use a lot or even try ‘non-appearance’ add-ons … but, with all these good reviews I thought I’d try it out, and I was surprised how RIDICULOUSLY accurate it was. No doubt, 5 stars – great tool. (Firefox keeps getting better and better.)

by usanyou on December 6, 2008

What a great research tool…This addon digs deep through the SERPs to bring me pages that I would never find without it – great for me and great for the pages that would otherwise remain buried! Had a little trouble with it in the beginning, through no fault of the addon. Am just as impressed with support. Slick!

This morning at the Launch: Silicon Valley 2009, Surf Canyon announced the launch of a collaborative effort with Search Cloudlet to produce a search site, available at Cloudlet.SurfCanyon.com, combining the two company’s complimentary technologies. In addition to having the opportunity to demonstrate the new product at LSV 2009, Josh Lowensohn, associate editor for CNET’s Webware.com, covered the launch and had this to say:

“The benefits of using this tool over Google alone are numerous… You… get Search Cloudlet’s sorting technology, which lets you filter results by domain or keyword from its word cloud. You also get Surf Canyon’s related results feature, which can recommend results from pages that appear deeper in a search. In my quick go, this was pulling up results from as deep as 25 pages (or 250 results from the top result) into a search.”

Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines also reported the launch. The press release is below.

Surf Canyon and Search Cloudlet Combine Their Technologies For Search

Mountain View, CA – June 09, 2009 – Surf Canyon and Search Cloudlet today announced, at Launch: Silicon Valley 2009 (http://launchsiliconvalley.org), the release of a new search engine, available at http://cloudlet.surfcanyon.com, which combines both of their technologies to offer users a fast and innovative method for finding information on the internet.

Surf Canyon develops technology for real-time implicit search personalization which assists users in finding relevant information buried within the often overwhelming quantity of search results. The software figures out what the user wants and then automatically recommends more relevant search results. By observing the user’s behavior as the search is taking place, Surf Canyon’s technology builds a real-time model of inferred intent, which is then used to calculate the “instantaneous relevancies” of documents in the result set. The instantaneous relevancies are then used to immediately move forward the most pertinent documents while pushing back those that are less relevant.

INTSPEI Search Cloudlet creates tag clouds for your search results, suggesting which keywords you should add to the search to narrow it in the most powerful way. Unlike existing cloud-based search tools, the Search Cloudlet offers context-sensitive navigation clouds: for web search, it provides tag-cloud, server-cloud and net-cloud search refinement tools. There are two main ways that Search Cloudlet helps users improve their search experience. First, it helps them efficiently narrow the search: a user should simply click on a cloud item (tag, server, etc.) to add it to (or remove from) the query. Second, it helps to provide a summary of all search results without even reviewing them – the cloud is located on the top of the page, so users do not even need to scroll down to learn what the resulting pages are about.

Surf Canyon and Search Cloudlet were initially offered as browser extensions. Now, however, both of these technologies are combined into an online search engine which does not require any downloads or installation in order to benefit from the combined technologies. Click http://cloudlet.surfcanyon.com and try the integrated Surf Canyon plus Search Cloudlet engine.

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.

About INTSPEI

The International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI, http://www.intspei.com) is a research organization with main office in Kiev (Ukraine). INTSPEI incubates, develops and distributes advanced productivity and software engineering tools based on the original award-winning research conducted by its founders since 2001.

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Update (6/10/2009) – Both CenterNetworks and Free Technology for Teachers wrote about the launch.

The big news with v2.0.5, released this morning, is integration with Microsoft’s shiny new search engine, Bing! Only launched on Monday of this week, Bing is very impressive and has been receiving wonderful reviews. Now, only a few days later, thanks to the latest version of Surf Canyon’s glowingly-reviewed, award-winning application, it’s even better:

• Real-time personalization – Easily find relevant information buried in Bing’s results with real-time re-ranking.
• Real-time results – Insert relevant real-time results from OneRiot and Twitter.
• Query refinements – Search reformulations are suggested based on your “at the moment” information need.
• Customize content – Use my.SurfCanyon.com to indicate the sources of information you prefer, as well as those you’d like to avoid.

Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team and author of The Next Big Thing, wrote about Surf Canyon’s integration with Bing:

Two… innovative startups, WebMynd and Surf Canyon, worked quickly to customize Bing with real-time search results powered by OneRiot. Surf Canyon CEO, Mark Cramer, said that they are excited about this integration because “Bing users can now re-rank search results ‘on the fly’ plus get OneRiot’s real-time web results to further transform Bing search results into dynamic portals of information.”

Additionally, the new version contains additional compatibility with Google’s search pages.

Finally, we’d like to suggest that our users give WOT (Web of Trust) a try. WOT warns you about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware, send spam or steal personal information. WOT’s color-coded icons show you ratings for over 22 million websites – green for trust, yellow for caution and red to stop – helping you avoid interaction with harmful sites. We ensured full compatibility with WOT in v2.0.3.

Enjoy! And, as always, we appreciate feedback.

Update (6/9/2009) – Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines covered the new release.