Surf Canyon
You can access the application either through the Surf Canyon website or as a plugin for your web browser. Either way, it takes the results from the search engine you already use, be it Google, Yahoo, or Bing, and it rearranges them to be more relevant for your needs. When you see a result you like, you can click on the bull's eye next to it, and Surf Canyon will recommend related pages (using technology that's more intent-based than Google's Similar Pages). And as you go to the next pages in your search, Surf Canyon rearranges those pages based on how you've been clicking.
In July, Surf Canyon relaunched its standalone website. Cramer says the plug-in has been and will continue to be the main distribution method, but the website helps the company make money, through both advertising and as a demonstration for potential licensing partners. In licensing first deal, Surf Canyon worked with a company called Brand Thunder to develop a customized version of Firefox for The Columbus Dispatch newspaper. That browser uses Surf Canyon technology to elevate articles from the Dispatch in search results, which is presumably what Dispatch fans want (see screenshot, annotated by Cramer, below). Surf Canyon has also made a licensing deal with a search engine, but Cramer says he can't identify the company yet.
As for the new research, Cramer presented a paper at the Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval's conference, and he says the SIGIR journal will also be publishing his findings. Here's what his paper says: Between normal search engines, it's hard to perform a direct, apples-to-apples comparison of relevance, since the experience can be so different. With Surf Canyon, however, you can compare behavior within a single search engine, by just turning the application's rearranging feature on and off for different experimental groups. So by studying user behavior, Cramer was able to show that when Surf Canyon rearranged the second search page, users were between 25 and 40 percent more likely to click on a result.
The new funding comes from new and existing angel investors. Surf Canyon has been downloaded 1 million times and processes 800,000 queries a day.