About Search

I've adapted the about:me (wiki) experimental extension to report on search behavior. About-me is described as:

A statistical analysis of the user's history, average tab load, etc. Like Google Zeitgeist, but based on their Places database.

Get it

Install about-search for Firefox. Enter about:search in your URL bar to view.

Learn More

Read the announcement blog post About:Search — Monitor Your Search Activity and the update post. You can also install about:shopping for data on your online consumption activities.

Experimental Version

Version 0.3.0 09/22/09. Improvements to query abandonment computation, support for the oddball Yahoo & eBay parameter strings. Known issues: vertical searches on subdirectories not domains, QA needed on query abandonment. Install version 0.3.2

Future Directions

Due to the deflation of the abandoned query metric by navigational queries, a user's default engine is likley to always be favored in this metric. An extension which promotes search engine promiscuity by randomizing the engine used from the Firefox search box could help distribute this noise across engines equally and enable users to more effectively evaluate different search engines effectiveness. Here's a picture of the query abandonment metric for one of my firefox instances on the majors engines.