Capitalizing on the “everything instant” trend, relevancy based search startup Surf Canyon launches their “Fully Dynamic Search” today in order to make searches on its site and more importantly on its browser extension more pertinent to users.
What’s unique about Surf Canyon as opposed to search engines like Google and Bing is that it serves up results based on user interaction, so if you click on a specific link while you’re searching (or the little Surf Canyon icon next to each result), the Surf Canyon algorithm takes your click into account and modifies the results on the page to be closer to the result that you looked at.
From CEO Mark Cramer on why Surf Canyon’s “Fully Dynamic” isn’t just another played out iteration of Google Instant:
“Dynamic” is the future of search and we feel we have a critical element to add to that. Instant makes the page faster (dynamically updating SERP after every key press), however, our innovation makes it more relevant (dynamically updating the order of results after every mouse click). The two together (Google Instant + Surf Canyon) make the search experience “Fully Dynamic.”
At the moment users on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome will be most comfortable with trying out Surf Canyon’s “Fully Dynamic” Instant search as a browser plugin, as the Surf Canyon site itself can be quite clunky. As an added bonus the plugin lets you manually add or delete preferred sites, even further increasing search relevancy.
Oakland based Surf Canyon currently has $1.1 Million in funding and is working on improving search navigation on its own homepage and well as moving search “away from statelessness to something more resembling a conversation.”
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for search. Available at their website or through a browser extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox, it claims to “improve” search results provided by Bing, Google and Yahoo. It pulls up results from further down the rankings and produces a re-ranked subset of results around each initial one. Here is their pitch: “Rather than leaving users to manually filter through static sets of links, this innovative application uses real-time behavior signals to calculate...
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