Surf Canyon: Queryless Discovery Engine

Posted on October 2, 2007

CNET's News.com reports that a new search site called Surf Canyon learns as you go. It isn't technically called a search engine -- apparently, the correct term is "queryless discovery engine."

Surf Canyon offers up a list of Web results to queries and if you hover over a particular link or click on a target icon next to a link, more results that are related to that particular page are displayed underneath it.
As you click on links, the system begins to learn, for instance, whether you are interested in Miami football or sea mammals if you typed in "dolphins." The more you click on results, the more you train the system.
Surf Canyon is not a search engine (it doesn't crawl the Internet, create an index, order pages by relevancy and provide a query interface). Rather, it is a "queryless discovery engine," says Mark Cramer, chief executive of the company.

"Queryless discovery engine" may be a little too complex sounding for the general public to grasp - maybe marketing can come up with a catchier concept. However, the idea of a tool that uses your previous queries to provide you with better results is a good one.

SEARCH ENGINES