Conversation With Search Application Surf Canyon CEO Mark Cramer

While in San Francisco earlier this month, I met with Surf Canyon CEO Mark Cramer. Surf Canyon began operations in 2006 and launched their search application in February 2008. The Surf Canyon search application sits on top of search engines Google and Yahoo. Compared to some of the other search engine addons I’ve reviewed in the past, Surf Canyon offers an interesting and innovative model. Surf Canyon is trying to solve the problem of too many search results for your search queries.

Cramer explained how the application works — basically you enter a search query on Google or Yahoo as you always do. You select a search result and go to that page. If that page isn’t what you were looking for, when you come back to the search result, Surf Canyon looks at results 11-1000 and then recommends other results similar to the one you clicked on. It ignores results you skipped over because it recognizes you weren’t interested in those results. Cramer noted that the idea is to make search results dynamic instead of the static results that Google and Yahoo provide by default.

Surf Canyon has raised $600k in angel funding, has 3 full time employees and several consultants.

The Surf Canyon application is installed via a Firefox/Internet Explorer addon. Cramer tells me that there’s been 250,000 downloads of the addon to-date. I asked Cramer about how he is marketing the search application because clearly mainstream Internet users just go to Google or Yahoo for search. He said that a large percentage of their marketing has come via word of mouth and that once users use the application they find it beneficial and share it with others. They have also been listed as a featured download in the Firefox addon catalog. The key to success for Surf Canyon is to continue to raise awareness of their application across the mainstream market.