“To be honest, I don’t google anymore. Search engines like Surf Canyon work just as well…”

We would point out that, for many queries, the innovative Dynamic Ranked Retrieval technology that we developed and embedded into our search page significantly improves the search experience over Google by automatically digging out relevant results for the user, but we are flattered nonetheless.

ChengXiang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 and another Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning and bioinformatics, and he has published over 100 papers in major conferences and journals in these areas, including five award papers.

He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Processing and Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Information Retrieval Journal. He is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004 , NAACL HLT 2007, and ACM SIGIR 2009, where Mark Cramer was a presenter. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received many awards, including the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2007 Microsoft Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, the 2009 IBM Faculty Award, the 2010 UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2011 HP Innovation Research Award.

We are thrilled to have ChengXiang on the team as we look forward to exploring new avenues to improve the efficiency of information retrieval as well as continuing our collaboration with the UIUC.

For ambiguous queries, conventional retrieval systems are bound by two conflicting goals. On the one hand, they should diversify and strive to present results for as many query intents as possible. On the other hand, they should provide depth for each intent by displaying more than a single result. Since both diversity and depth cannot be achieved simultaneously in the conventional static retrieval model, we propose a new dynamic ranking approach. In particular, our proposed two-level dynamic ranking model allows users to adapt the ranking through interaction, thus overcoming the constraints of presenting a one-size-fits-all static ranking.

Surf Canyon is again referenced, along with our 2009 SIGIR research paper:

We argue that a key to solving the conflict between depth and diversity lies in the move to dynamic retrieval models [2] that can take advantage of user interactions. Instead of presenting a single one-size-fits-all ranking, dynamic retrieval models allow users to adapt the ranking dynamically through interaction, as is done by surfcanyon.com [5].

In February 2008, Surf Canyon launched its Dynamic Ranked Retrieval application to rave reviews. As the body of research relating to Dynamic Ranked Retrieval grows, we continue to be encouraged by the potential of this technology to vastly enhance the quality of information retrieval.

In addition to his passion for software engineering, Brandon studies Shorinji Kempo, an art that focuses on personal improvement and the balance between strength and compassion. He is also a father. His 13-month-old daughter just recently gained some proficiency in walking and is intensely interested in exploring the world around her. She’s also very interested in daddy’s toys (like the laptop and Xbox controller) and has begun building structures with Mega Bloks. Clearly an engineer already in the making!

Our first hire in a few years, we’re thrilled to welcome Brandon to the team!

Importantly, relevant search results are increasingly deemed to be personalized. Autonomous search agents that make suggestions based on personal data, including the user’s location, metadata, and more advanced algorithms, are in sight. For example, Surf Canyon, a US company, is developing real-time, personalized search capabilities that transform static lists of search results into dynamic pages that rerank results based on a user’s real-time online activity.

Surf Canyon is proud to be a sponsor of the Fifth Annual International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2012). After having our research selected for oral presentation at SIGIR ’09 in Boston and then having attended other academic conferences, we have a strong appreciation for the effort and dedication required to produce high-quality research in the very challenging field of search. While we didn’t have a paper to submit this time, we will naturally be attending the conference and look forward to the presentations as well as connecting, and reconnecting, with talented researches from around the world.

In the session “Reinventing the Search Experience,” between Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google, Mark will be talking about “Search as a Conversation – The End of the ‘Stateless’ Results Page.” Having dynamically re-ranked over 1.3 billion queries over the past few years, Surf Canyon is uniquely positioned to discuss the potential of one of the most significant relevance-enhancing innovations since PageRank.

[Update 5/10/11] The video of Mark’s presentation is now online:

• Stephan Weitz – Director, Bing Search
• John Battelle – Founder, Federated Media and Author, The Search
• Johanna Wright – Product Management Director, Google Search
• ShaShi Seth – Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products
• Mark Cramer – CEO, Surf Canyon

Mark Cramer had this to say:

For the past 40 years since the inception of search, the way it’s worked is this: user enters a query, that query is matched to an index of documents, tremendous activity is deployed to try to determine the relevancies of those different documents, and a search result set is produced. But that search result set is static. There’s an order to those results. They go from 1 to 10 and then 11 to 50 million, and that order does not change. It’s stateless.

What we have been doing for the past few years is essentially applying state to the search page in order to make the results dynamic. And if you consider “dynamic” to be something resembling a conversation in the sense that the search result page is actually responding to every input from the user to alter the content on the fly, then I think that’s an interesting way of looking at searching.

The competition, however, is extremely stiff:

• AdBlock Plus – A perennial favorite, it has been download from Mozilla over 110 million times, has over 2000 user comments and has been the most popular add-on for as long as we can remember.
• DownThemAll! – With over 40 million downloads, this is another favorite for people who want to download videos.
• Greasemonkey – Surf Canyon started out as a Greasemonkey script. With over 40 million downloads, too, not only are we fans, but we owe this one a debt of gratitude.
• StumbleUpon – Funded by some of the most prominent angels in Silicon Valley, acquired by eBay for $75MM in 2007 and then sold back to its founders in 2009, this hugely popular add-on is also one of the most financially successful add-ons ever.

We are honored, as we were last year, to be in such esteemed company. But we, too, bring quite a few things to the table. As the developer of an innovative and powerful search technology, there are few companies (if any) that can lay claim to dramatically improving the relevancy of Google’s own search results. We have also received many plaudits from users and the media as well as significant recognition in the academic community. The future of search, arguably one of the most important endeavors on the internet, is not always easy to see, but we are delivering it for millions of people every day.

So vote for Surf Canyon! Thank you and, as always, we appreciate the support.