Surf Canyon improves search...really

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Just when you might have foolishly thought that the world of online searching couldn't produce yet another enhancement along comes Surf Canyon. Need I mention that  this software is in [drum roll please], beta?

At just 23KB the remarkably lightweight Surf Canyon, which works with Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 2+, is a client-side search enhancement.

Once installed Surf Canyon watches for searches on the major engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Craigslist and then monitors your behavior and profiles your searching. Surf Canyon can then execute searches within your results and incorporates the new results related, so the company implies, to your search usage with the current results in the same browser windows on the fly.

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Just when you might have foolishly thought that the world of online searching couldn't produce yet another enhancement along comes Surf Canyon. Need I mention that  this software is in [drum roll please], beta?

At just 23KB the remarkably lightweight Surf Canyon, which works with Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 2+, is a client-side search enhancement.

Once installed Surf Canyon watches for searches on the major engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Craigslist and then monitors your behavior and profiles your searching. Surf Canyon can then execute searches within your results and incorporates the new results related, so the company implies, to your search usage with the current results in the same browser windows on the fly.

When you’ve conducted a search you’ll see a circle and arrow logo at the end of the title of each result. Clicking on this logo triggers the subsidiary searching feature of Surf Canyon, which semantically analyzes the current results and embeds links so you can follow the categories related to a search result(s).

According to Mark Cramer, Surf Canyon’s CEO, “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.”

In use, Surf Canyon is very pleasantly discrete and for the first week or so you’ll probably forget to use it. Even so, eventually you’ll start clicking on the bullseye logos and you’ll get hooked.

Exactly how the service works isn’t spelled out in any detail, but this is definitely a case where explaining the product doesn’t work very well and where using the product is the proof.

Surf Canyon (no, I have no idea why it is called that) is free and definitely worth using.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.