Capitalizing on the “everything instant” trend, relevancy based search startup Surf Canyon launches their “Fully Dynamic Search” this week, in order to make searches on its site and more importantly 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. → Read More
It’s hard to compete in the search engine market, but one approach taken by several startups is to sit on top of the big search engines and try to improve their results or interface. Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply add new spokes? Surf Canyon, a bootstrapped startup I wrote about last February, re-orders results on Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search through a browser add-on. Previously self-funded, the startup has raised a seed round of $600,000 from angel investors. It is showing that even a search startup can be built on the cheap. Surf Canyon is probably not going to be the next Google, but it does improve the traditional search interface by pulling up related results that otherwise would be buried on page 12 or page 52 of the regular results. Here’s how I described the service in my initial review: Whenever you do a search, a little bullseye icon appears at the right of each result. If you click on the bullseye, Surf Canyon inserts three recommended search results that are similar to the one you clicked on. They appear indented under the result you are trying to drill down into. The results are hit or miss. Surf Canyon basically gets three chances per click to come up with a relevant recommendation. In general, it comes closer than if you hit the “Similar pages” link that Google provides with every search result, but it still feels pretty random. Showing more than three recommended results would help. But what I like best about Surf Canyon is the interface. It doesn’t take you to another Web page. The recommended results just appear underneath the appropriate link. It feels more like an application than a cumbersome Website where you have to click through multiple pages to find what you want. Google could take a lesson in interface design from Surf Canyon here with all of its Ajax goodness. I find that I still use the Surf Canyon feature on a regular basis. The results, though, are still hit or miss. Maybe the new funds will help them fine-tune their algorithm. CrunchBase Information Surf Canyon Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Creating a new search engine seems like a futile exercise. If Yahoo and Microsoft cannot compete with Google in search, what chance does a startup have? So instead of creating new search engines, we are starting to see the rise of search applications that sit on top of existing search engines. Two recent examples are Surf Canyon, which publicly launched its browser add-on today, and ManagedQ, which launched its own site quietly a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing around with both for about a week. They both offer improvements to the pared-down search interface that we are all used to and point to areas where search can be made better. Not bad for two startups without any venture capital (Surf Canyon has raised $250,000 in angel money, and ManagedQ is run out of the founder’s basement in Palo Alto). Still, while both point in the right direction, neither one comes close to offering a better overall search experience than Google does on its own. Surf Canyon is an application that sits on top of regular search results. The startup has its own Website where you can conduct searches, but the browser add-on makes it much more practical to use. The add-on is for either Firefox or Internet Explorer, and essentially allows you to re-order search results on Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live Search. (Google doesn’t like it when other Websites re-order its search rankings, but Surf Canyon doesn’t rely on Google’s APIs to do what it does and thus feels that it is not bound by Google’s restrictions). Whenever you do a search, a little bullseye icon appears at the right of each result. If you click on the bullseye, Surf Canyon inserts three recommended search results that are similar to the one you clicked on. They appear indented under the result you are trying to drill down into. For instance, if you search for “techcrunch,” the three recommended results might be a link to TechCrunch UK, Crunchgear, and the TechCrunch Tech President Primaries (the recommended results change over time, even for the same search). You can drill down two more times within the recommended results to keep on refining your search. So if you click on the bullseye again next to one of the recommended links, you might get a link to TechCrunch on Amazon’s Kindle store from page 8 of the regular Google results, a mention in → Read More
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