Surf Canyon Selected “Best Search Engine” in About.com Reader’s Choice Awards

Real-time Search Personalization Tops Google, Yahoo! and Bing

OAKLAND, CALIF. March 9, 2010 – Surf Canyon, the popular developer of real-time search personalization, was selected by the About Web Search 2010 Reader’s Choice Awards as the “Best Search Engine.” The competition included the major search engines in additional to a number of start-ups.

Since April 2006, Surf Canyon has developed technology to improve the relevancy of organic and sponsored results through real-time re-ranking. By observing user actions as the search is being conducted, Surf Canyon is able to disambiguate intent “on the fly” in order to automatically “dig out” relevant results from as deep as page 100, as well as deliver more highly-targeted advertisements. Static search result pages are now effectively transformed into dynamic conversations.

“The real-time and implicit user actions that Surf Canyon uses to improve the searching and finding experience are cutting edge,” states Jim Jansen, Associate Professor at Penn State University. “It is great for finding those ‘deep’ but relevant results when conducting difficult or ambiguous queries.”

The technology is available with Surf Canyon’s own search engine, launched in July 2009 and available at http://www.SurfCanyon.com. It is additionally offered as a browser add-on for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome and has been downloaded over 1.5 million times since being launched in February 2008. The add-on adds a real-time search personalization “layer” directly on top of Google, Yahoo! and Bing, enabling users to benefit from the technology as they search on the major search engines.

The service is currently handling 1 million queries per day, allowing Surf Canyon to accurately study, using blind control-group tests, the objective enhancements offered by real-time search personalization. As detailed in the research paper entitled “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-Time Implicit Relevance Feedback (http://bit.ly/SurfCanyonResearch),” recently published by SIGIR, Surf Canyon’s technology increases the relevancy of organic search results by up to 40%. Further studies have subsequently been conducted to demonstrate the statistically-significant extent to which advertising revenue is enhanced.

###########

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 search personalization software. Its patents-pending technology transforms result pages from lists of static links into dynamic conversations, offering users an automated way to find relevant results buried deep within the search pages.