It wasn’t too long ago that we pushed out v2.0.1, but v2.0.2 could not wait. Perhaps that’s because it has to do with real-time information for your searches on the major search engines.

Back in December, ReadWriteWeb start talking about how Twitter, a very popular micro-blogging service, could deliver search results “in real time.” Search engines typically have to index a page before it can be searched, which requires time. Searching Twitter, however, enables access to real-time information as there is no built in latency. As soon as someone Tweets it, you can search it.

OneRiot, a new social search engine that find the “pulse” of the web, also delivers real-time information. They keep a running record of the contents of the Internet, however, unlike other search engines, they prioritize that information based on its current (i.e. real-time) popularity. That makes OneRiot’s search results, as they say, “relevant, fresh, friendly and pulsing with the real-time energy of the web.”

Now with Surf Canyon you can have all these real-time results inserted directly onto the search pages of your favorite search engines. Go to my.SurfCanyon.com and check the boxes for Twitter and OneRiot. The next time you search on Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft Live, should real-time results be available and relevant then they’ll automatically be inserted onto the page.

Mark Gibbs at Network World just wrote up Surf Canyon for the second time (here was the first) and we are flattered!

“Also on my list when it comes to search is a cool browser add-on/plug-in that I now can’t live without: the Surf Canyon browser search assistant.

What’s surprising about Surf Canyon is just how good it is! I find that about 50% of the time when I return to a results page Surf Canyon has considerably improved the relevance of the results. I now consider Surf Canyon indispensable and award it a rating of five out of five. Remarkable.”

In a follow-up email exchange, Mark offered:

“Surf Canyon is one of the best search tools I’ve seen for some time. You may quote me on that.”

Tech.com, a media property owned and operated by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois and focused on providing news on research and emerging innovations that are developed within universities, research labs and start-up companies throughout the world, today announced that Surf Canyon and the UIUC have “come together to commercialize the concept of real-time implicit personalization.”

We are honored to have the privilege of working with such an esteemed university and are enthusiastic about continuing the collaboration in this exciting area of information retrieval.

Surf Canyon has been around since April of 2006, however, it was one year ago today that we launched our application to some very flattering reviews. Since then, there have been a number of exciting achievements during our first year:

• Over 500 thousand people benefited from our search technology
• Over 80 million queries on Google, Yahoo!, Live Search and Craigslist were enhanced using our real-time re-ranking
• Over 350 million search results were “recommended”
• We shared the Mossberg Solution column in the WSJ with Google and were very well received
• ReadWriteWeb selected us as one of the Top 100 Products and Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
• Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, added us to their list of “Recommended” add-ons

As such, we are today officially removing the “Beta” label from our website and application.

The path for most every start-up is long and difficult and we continue to have a considerable amount of road before us. While we will inevitably face many new challenges, we’d like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to some of the people who’ve helped us to get this far:

• Mozilla for facilitating the development of add-ons as well as providing tremendous feedback and invaluable assistance in distributing the application
• Microsoft for prominently including our application in the IE Gallery and for SilkRoad
• Yahoo! for BOSS
• All of the companies who’ve built amazing search engines upon which we build
• Our investors for putting their confidence in our vision
• All of the journalists and bloggers who took the time and made the effort to evaluate our software
• All of the people who’ve downloaded our application and the thousands of people who’ve generously offered their encouragement, feedback, praise, criticisms, comments and advice

While it’s fun to look back at our accomplishments, we’re now focused on the year ahead and are very excited about the future.

It’s been over ten weeks since our last release of Surf Canyon, but the latest version (v2.0.1) was pushed out today. The most notable enhancement is support for Lexis Web, a new freely-available legal search engine where you can search legal-oriented web sites that are determined by LexisNexis to be trustworthy and authoritative.

Also, for Internet Explorer, the native navigation has been restored to the bottom of the page, which has been the case with Firefox since version 1.1.3.  Lastly, for Firefox, the text at the top of the search page that says “Results 1 to 10 of 20,000,000” is now updated to reflect the actual number of search results on the page.

Kate Greene, Information Technology Editor at Technology Review, established in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the oldest technology magazine in the world, wrote an article entitled “Digging Deeper in Web Search – A personalization search tool reveals links buried deep within page results” featuring Surf Canyon.

“Crucially, these new results are cleverly slipped into the search results so that the original results page doesn’t look drastically different when a user navigates back.”

“Marti Hearst, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, says that Surf Canyon succeeds in presenting the reordered links in a clear, useful, and unobtrusive way. It doesn’t require people to do any extra work, as does Google’s WikiSearch, a feature that lets users personalize their results by voting them up or down.”

Bob Christopher, entrepreneur, innovator and creator of InnerCircle 1 Venture Forum, sat down to talk with Mark Cramer about the inspiration for Surf Canyon and what it takes to build a successful start-up.

Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon, offers some thoughts on the Mozilla blog regarding gathering and responding to user feedback. We have done our best to collect as much as information as possible from our users, as well as anyone else who wishes to offer feedback, and will continue to strive to respond, to the best of our ability, to the inquiries and suggestions of everyone who contacts us.

T-Mobile Netherlands, which manages the second largest ISP in the Netherlands, Online.nl, has named Surf Canyon to its list of “Five essential plugins to get more out of Firefox.”

Yesterday, The Mossberg Solution Column of the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Google’s SearchWiki and Surf Canyon. While we’ve released an update of our software to make sure that these two technologies are compatible and have discussed how they compliment each other, it’s perhaps worth positioning these technologies in a larger framework of search personalization.

Personalization is often been divided into two categories, implicit and explicit, the respective merits of which have been debated. Implicit personalization is based on preferences inferred from behavioral information. While this doesn’t require any effort on the part of the user, making accurate determinations of intent can be challenging. On the other hand, explicit personalization is driven by direct indication from the user. The intent is often clearer, however, the onus is on the user to make the effort to specify preferences.

Since April 2006, Surf Canyon has been looking at personalization from a different perspective: real-time vs. long-term. Real-time personalization alters the user experience instantly as behavioral signals are collected. While determining intent “on the fly” is challenging given the requirement for speed and the paucity of data, the signals are typically very strong. Long-term personalization, by contrast, relies on the accumulation of considerable user data over a significant amount of time. Determining the user’s “at the moment” intent can be difficult given how quickly the signals decay and how often users change context.

Nevertheless, as indicated here, all of these options are currently available to the internet searcher:

Surf Canyon v1 – Our flagship product introduced real-time implicit personalization for search. By observing the actions of the user as the search is taking place, the application helps people find information by re-ranking the results instantly, effectively transforming the search page from a static list of links to a dynamic set of results that “work with” the user.

Google Personalization – By observing the search pattern and click history of the user over an extended period of time, Google builds a profile of the user’s long-term interests which are then used to personalize the results for future searches. The first post on this blog analyzed some of the benefits and shortcomings of this technology.

Surf Canyon v2 – Launched in December ’08, v2 of Surf Canyon introduced my.SurfCanyon.com, enabling users, should they so desire, to explicitly indicate sources of content they prefer as well as those that they dislike. These long-term preferences are then taken into account to, once again, personalize search results to the user’s benefit.

Google SearchWiki – Launched in November ’08, SeachWiki offers controls to enable users to manually manipulate search results. By clicking a button, results may immediately be “promoted” to the top of the search page or deleted altogether. The next time the user runs the same search, the user’s personal modifications will be displayed.

Different users will have varying appreciations for the costs and benefits associated with each of these technologies, however, they are all compatible and, to a large extent, compliment each other. Today’s internet searchers are therefore free to use all of them, some of them or none of them, as they prefer.

Update (1/15/09) – Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines ran this post under their “Guest Authors” series.