Mozilla Lab's RecallMonkey Enhances Firefox History Search

The Mozilla Labs Prospector project centers around search, though some experiments under the Prospector umbrella have went way beyond that and came up with radically new user interfaces.

The latest goes back to the roots though, it's a new history search tool dubbed RecallMonkey which enables users to find sites they've visited even if they don't remember exactly what they were named and what was on the page.

"We make a lot of web searches with the intention of finding something we’ve seen before. If you’re trying to recall a page, chances are your browser has seen it before," Mozilla Labs intern Abhinav Sharma wrote.

"Unfortunately, the search features built into most browsers are based on exact-match methods," he added.

"This is where RecallMonkey comes in. Internet search engines don’t do exact-matching, they rank based on how closely your search query and document matches," he said.

"So we borrowed a leaf from their book and wrote a ranked search engine on top of Firefox’s history database. Then, we added on some other features like filtering by time and the ability to 'pin' websites," he explained.

The way it works is simple, you open up RecallMonkey and type the query as best you can remember. You don't have to be very exact, the search engine should be able to retrieve the page you're looking for even if it's a partial match.

It helps if you can remember when you visited the site last, so you ca use the time frame filters. Another interesting feature is the ability to 'pin' websites if you know where the page you're looking for is but you don't know exactly which one is it.

RecallMonkey is available in the Mozilla online repositories, but it's an experimental one so stability is not the first concern. There aren't a lot of features in the new Labs experiment, but it's an interesting approach that should be a great improvement if and when it makes into Firefox proper.