Have you tried Mozilla's Context Graph?

To help you find the content you are searching on the web, Mozilla has announced a new project: the Context Graph. By studying browser activity at scale, they want to build a 'recommender system' that aims to provide personalized search results based on previously-found solutions to similar problems.

In short, the company is looking to build “a better forward button” that helps you understand a topic, find alternative solutions to a problem, and in general allow browsers to offer useful information without demanding input.

Mozilla describes the new project as: “The goal for Context Graph features is to help people find new stuff based on their current context. For example, lots of pages link to a single YouTube video, but there’s no way to get at all those pages from the YouTube video itself. If we can understand this network of links, we can use it to build a better recommendation system.”

Context Graph will naturally raise privacy concerns. Nick Nguyen, Firefox’s Vice President of product explains that Mozilla is working with a group of volunteer users to figure out how best to collect data and start building experimental systems for making contextual recommendations.

He also promised that the tool will respect user privacy and be open source, “We also believe there is no necessary tradeoff to be made between user control and personalization, and we will prove that these products are achievable without violating user trust or privacy. We will work to make sure our users understand what they’re sharing and the value they get in return. True to our open heritage, our methods will be open for scrutiny by anyone.”

After mentioning both Google and Facebook, Nguyen explained that this latest project comes from the same place that all of Mozilla’s recent initiatives do: The web is becoming less open. “What concerns us is the long-term impact of a world where a small number of companies dominate the web for discovery and services, and the leverage that creates,” he said. “ the only path for new ideas requires either payment or acquisition, either of which tend to cost a lot of money.”

One of Context Graph's features, Activity Stream, actually went live back in May on the Firefox add-on Test Pilot. Activity Stream makes it easier to navigate through your browsing history and rediscover the sites you love the most on the web. But Mozilla promises it will evolve into a better shape to help you discover places on the web you haven’t yet seen.