Mozilla Labs' Prospector Will Focus on Advanced In-Browser Search Experiments

Mozilla Labs has announced Prospector, a new project which will focus on the search experience inside the browser. The team will run a number of experiments to test various ideas related to search, though, the details are a bit sketchy at the moment.

"Prospector is a new series of experiments from Mozilla Labs focused on analyzing, experimenting and prototyping improvements on how you search and discover content with Firefox," Mozilla's Edward Lee, announced.

"To start, we’re focusing on three main areas: websites you have visited, tabs you are currently viewing, and pages you haven’t visited yet. In each of these, there are different aspects of traversing through existing behavior, extracting relevant information and discovering better ways to search," he added.

Note that the search features on which Prospector will focus, have to do with the browser itself and less with search engines or the web. The aim is to improve the search tools available in Firefox, like the Awesome Bar.

For example, by analyzing your search behavior, Firefox can associate certain keywords with websites you visited after searching for them. This way, the browser can suggest those websites without actually conducting a web search the next time you use the keyword.

In practical terms, you can expect a number of experiments from the Prospector team as soon as the Jetpack framework and add-ons which don't require a browser restart are available in Firefox 4.

Recently Mozilla has started focusing some of its resources on more long-term projects. The Mozilla Labs teams are working on various technologies and ideas, some of which have landed in Firefox, some which are on their way and some which may remain just experiments.

The Personas experiment, for example, proved very successful and was integrated in Firefox 3.6. Firefox Sync, formerly known as Weave, is available in Firefox 4, after being a Labs experiment for a quite a long time. Even the Jetpack platform, which is slated to replace the legacy add-on platform in Firefox, started out as a Labs project.