The Big Report on Internet Search

Richard Martin at InformationWeek, writing for Internet Evolution, put together “The Big Report” entitled “The Right Search Tool” on advances in the search industry. The article is also available on page 35 of the September 29th edition of InformationWeek. Here are the bits that concern Surf Canyon, which was one of the select companies profiled:

At-work surfers (assuming they’re actually working and not looking for the latest Gnarls Barkley video) “are not just exploring and experiencing things on the Web,” says Surf Canyon founder Mark Cramer. “Their objective is more specific, and they need to get it in a more timely fashion.”

… there are new tools that aren’t really search engines at all. Often these come embedded in other types of applications. Launched in February, Surf Canyon is a browser extension that uses “semantic real-time implicit personalization” to sort results from the large search engines and pull the most relevant to the fore. Surf Canyon watches and learns from user behavior signals to calculate “instantaneous relevancies” to select the most useful needles from a mountainous haystack of search results.

“Like many innovations, the concept was born out of frustration,” CEO Mark Cramer says of Surf Canyon’s tool.

The next day, bulletins-electroniques.com, the largest international technology watch service coming from the global network of French Embassy Scientific Services, had this to say:

“In practice, Surf Canyon quickly proved to be indispensable… even if users do not understand how Surf Canyon treats the pages (trade secrets oblige), they get results more relevant than before.”

Update (12/15/08) - Information Week in China also ran this article.