Surf Canyon today announced the close of its initial seed round of financing. $600,000 in funding was received from prominent investors and business executives in San Francisco, New England, Paris and London. The proceeds will be used for continued development of the company's Discovery Engine for Search, an application (available for Internet Explorer and Firefox at www.SurfCanyon.com) that accelerates the search process on Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live.
"I met the founders of Surf Canyon in March and am extremely impressed with both the team and their vision for transforming search," said Tom Brackett, a seed round participant and angel
investor from Connecticut. "After using the product for an extended period of time, I am also astounded by the extent to which it improves the search experience."
"We're thrilled at the support received from our investors," said Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon. "These funds enable a number of new possibilities and we're looking forward to executing
on our strategy, which will include expanding the team and launching a Marketing campaign designed to introduce the product to more users."
Understanding user intent is one of the principal challenges of information retrieval. When there were only tens or hundreds of millions of items on the internet, relying on comparatively
fuzzy notions of intent derived from two- and three-word queries was largely sufficient. Now that the major search engines index tens of billions of items, however, it has become
increasingly difficult, if not mathematically impossible, to effectively match these queries with the available content. Thus, in order to produce relevant results, more information
regarding the user's intent is required. Surf Canyon alleviates this problem by extracting insight from post-query behavior signals, as the search is being conducted, and then exploiting
the intelligence immediately to enable users to find relevant information buried in the result set.
According to Gene Munster, a Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray who specializes in Internet and Digital Media, "After having spent time analyzing Surf Canyon's
product, we believe that, because of its ability to quickly and easily enable users to locate relevant information that might otherwise have been impossible to find, real-time
personalization represents a significant next step in the evolution of search."
About Surf Canyon
Surf Canyon develops real-time implicit personalization technology for internet search. Its patents-pending Discovery Engine for Search transforms result pages from lists of static links
into dynamic knowledge resources, enabling users to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among all the irrelevant results, significantly accelerating the search
process. Surf Canyon has headquarters in Oakland, California and is recognized by DEMO.com as an "Innovator to Watch."