1 / 20

Presentation for Bay Area Search Meetup

Presentation for Bay Area Search Meetup. Dynamic Ranked Retrieval. Surf Canyon Technology. Improves relevancy of organic results (up to 40% on top of Google) and revenue generated by sponsored links (over 4% ).

chynna
Download Presentation

Presentation for Bay Area Search Meetup

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Presentation for Bay Area Search Meetup

  2. Dynamic Ranked Retrieval Surf Canyon Technology Improves relevancy of organic results (up to 40% on top of Google) and revenue generated by sponsored links (over 4%) • Harnesses real-time user behavior data to dynamically alter SERP “on the fly” • Sits atop search engine as additional intelligent, post-processing layer • Operates automatically in background without explicit user input • Provides “encouragement” and “entertainment” to search experience • Two patents issued. Third pending. 2

  3. About 75% of the actions someone takes when they receive a search result page would indicate they didn't get the correct information, so they either click back or retype their query – Mike Nichols, GM of search at Microsoft People search for 11 minutes on average before finding what they're looking for, and half abandon searches without getting that far. – Microsoft The most popular feature in search is the back-click – Stefan Weitz, Director at Bing Opportunity for Improvement • Half of potential Web sales are lost because visitors simply can't find what they want. – Gartner • According to Outsell, in a study indicating rising frustration with internet search, “in many instances the culprit is search failure due to irrelevant results.” – MediaPost, “Irrelevant Results Threaten Search” • 79% of professionals feel that their queries are not always understood and only 10% find what they are looking for on the first attempt. – Convera 3

  4. Media Coverage “If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches... you might like Surf Canyon... Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn't have opened... your days of futile Web searching are numbered.” – The Mossberg Solution “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.” – Gene Munster, Managing Director at “I’ve been using the plug-in for several weeks now and have quickly grown to love it. It’s one of my favorite types of technology - I downloaded it and forgot about it until it made my life easier.” – Carla Thompson, senior analyst at “… what I like best about Surf Canyon is the interface. It doesn’t take you to another Web page. The recommended results just appear underneath the appropriate link. It feels more like an application than a cumbersome website where you have to click through multiple pages to find what you want. Google could take a lesson in interface design from Surf Canyon here with all of its Ajax goodness.”– Erick Schonfeld, co-editor at “Surf Canyon is one of the best search tools I’ve seen for some time. You may quote me on that.” – Mark Gibbs, columnist at 4

  5. Industry Recognition Research paper entitled “Demonstration of Improved Search Result Relevancy Using Real-time Implicit Relevancy Feedback” was published by SIGIR in December 2009. “Surf Canyon’s evaluation is done on an operational system with real users, and it gives a lot of insight into the benefits of real-time personalization. This is a great paper and one of the most interesting, original and relevant IR papers I have read in a while!” – Thorsten Joachims, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University 5

  6. Instantaneous Relevancy Searcher clicks result #5 Initial relevancies as determined by underlying search engine #5 becomes most relevant (instantaneous relevance) Some relevancies increase Recalculated relevancies as determined using instantaneous user intent model Others decrease 6

  7. Illustration I: Ambiguity in Keyword Search Searcher is looking for reviews and clicks this link 7

  8. Illustration II: Recommendations and Targeted Advertisements Sponsored links take advantage of improved targeting Results immediately re-ranked from subsequent pages 8

  9. Illustration III: Cumulative Instantaneous User Model Subsequent pages completely re-ranked based on instantaneous user intent model 9

  10. Demonstration 10

  11. Adoption Statistics • Since launching Surf Canyon in February ’08, adoption has been strong and retention has been exceptional. Over 6 billion queries processed to date. • November ’09 – Surpassed 1 million queries a day • May ’11 – Surpassed 10 million queries a day • % of all result clicks that are recommendations: • Google 8%± 0.1% • Yahoo! 8%± 0.6% • Bing 9%± 0.8% • % of all result clicks after the 1st that are recommendations: • Google 18%± 0.2% • Yahoo! 23%± 0.4% • Bing 22%± 1.8% 11

  12. Relevancy Evaluation P(IR) = 3.2 – (0.0025 ± 0.00101) * IR Instantaneous relevancy has virtually no dependence on initial rank 12

  13. Relevancy Evaluation Recommendations: ~80% improvement in click frequency with instantaneous user intent model. Consistent for all display positions Recommended Link Test 13

  14. Finding Stuff Faster Data from millions of real user queries demonstrate the extent to which users are now able to access relevant information. Surf Canyon improves relevancy by up to 40% in blind page 2 test. Result – Unambiguous absolute user preference for dynamic re-ranking using implicit relevance feedback 14

  15. Results Vary by Category E-commerce and Reformulations are particularly amenable to real-time implicit personalization. 15

  16. Results Vary by Query Length Difficult and heavy-recall queries, which correlate well with query length, provide superior opportunities for real-time implicit personalization, although there is a positive benefit across all query lengths. 16

  17. Results Vary by Result Set Homogeneity Queries that offer a relatively homogeneous result set present fewer obvious opportunities for reformulation and, as a result, benefit more from real-time implicit personalization. 17

  18. Revenue Enhancement When using instantaneous user intent model to personalize Sponsored Links: 4.0% ± 4.5% (95% confidence interval, 7% two-tail t-test) revenue enhancement Ads are targeted using instantaneous user intent model generated during previous queries Test conducted with lack of CPC information, no granular data and no opportunity to optimize the ad selection or display This was the first and only test conducted with a 1st tier ad feed Conclusion: Significant opportunity for even better results through collaboration 18

  19. Business Status Mark Cramer, CEO – 20 years of in-depth technology industry knowledge and experience at Hewlett-Packard, Keynote Systems, NexTag and NetGeo, where he was CEO. EE from MIT and MBA from Harvard. Mike Wertheim, Chief Architect – 22 years of experience in software development including 9 years as an engineer at Sybase and 3 years as Chief Architect at Linkify. BS in Computer Engineering from CMU. 19

  20. Thank you Mark Cramer mcramer@surfcanyon.com @surfcanyon

More Related