SurfCanyon: It’s a Feature, But One Google Should Buy

Every so often, one of these “not an app, but a feature” products surprises me. SurfCanyon is one of those feature products. Originally designed as a web site, they have relaunched as a browser plug-in designed to make your search results better.

SurfCanyon runs on top of Google, Yahoo, and Live searches (not Ask.com, though, or any of the search aggregators like Dogpile), unobtrusively. All you see is a small target icon next to a link in search results. If you click the icon, SurfCanyon will cull results it thinks are relevant to the link you selected, and insert them under the link you chose. Of course, they like to brag a little bit by telling you which page of search results they found the links on (I almost expected the page 10 to have !!!!!!!1! after it), but if you choose the icon next to any of those additional links? SurfCanyon drills down even further.

There are a few annoyances, such as the fact that Mac users have to be using Firefox to use it (no plug-in for Camino or Safari). And their web site has an annoying sensor script that checks to see if you've already installed the plug-in and forwards you on. If you happen to have a non-compatible browser, they ALSO dump the page content into a blurb for Firefox, which is especially annoying when you are trying to get the quick information or show someone else the site.

But I installed it last night to test it and then forgot about it. First thing this morning, when I started searching, there it was. And while it doesn't come anywhere near to what I'd call “semantic search” which is their claim, it speeds up that whole paging-through-results dance or the far nerdier insert-boolean spasm we all do when trying to find something. I'm guessing that Google might want to hop to buying this one before Microsoft grabs it first. After all, Bill Gates said they'll be stepping up search regardless of whether they acquire Yahoo. You don't want to let Bill get out of the gate first.