CEO Interview: Surf Canyon's Mark Cramer Is a PC
About.com has announced the winners of its 2010 Reader's Choice Awards. The award for the "Best Search Engine" category is Surf Canyon.
Wendy Boswell explained the results on About.com, "The race for the Best Search Engine was intriguing, with a relatively unknown newcomer, Surf Canyon, picking up 48% of the votes and beating out search engine powerhouses Google, Bing, and Yahoo."
Google was a distant 2nd, picking up 34% of the votes. Third place, Yahoo!, tallied just 7% of votes. Bing limped behind with 3%.
Since Surf Canyon has flown under so many of our radars, I reached out to the CEO, Mark Cramer, who agreed to answer some questions about their search engine, their goals, and even some questions as personal as "what phone are you carrying?" By besting Google and with more than 200 million queries to date, Surf Canyon seems to be catching on.
What is your "elevator speech" explanation of Surf Canyon?
Surf Canyon develops "real-time search personalization." Our patents-pending technology transforms result pages from lists of static links into dynamic conversations, offering users an automated way to find relevant results buried deep within the search pages.
People can simply search at SurfCanyon.com, but they can also download an add-on--how does that add-on work?
We offer two methods for people to enjoy the benefits of real-time search personalization. It's baked into our search engine at SurfCanyon.com; however, we realize that many people would, for various reasons, prefer to continue searching on one of the major search engines. Since real-time search personalization is figuratively a "layer" on top of search, by enabling this through a browser add-on, it becomes somewhat literally as well.
Personalizing search results has scared people who think they will miss certain results--does that feature limit searches?
That's a question of trust. There are certainly some people who might trust an initial ranking as opposed to a personalized ranking; however, they're both based on algorithms, with the latter simply taking signals from a personal profile into account. As far as Surf Canyon is concerned, since few people bother with the hassle of digging beyond page two, having an application do it for you automatically offers considerable incremental value.
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