I wanted to see if advances in technology could now allow computers to read my mind. And so I set out to find an answer to this. [Go straight to results.]

For a start, I spend 90% of my time online, surfing the web with my Firefox browser. I didn't want to go into the area of packet sniffing, because I don't just want the computer or the network to read my intentions, but also help me find the things I was looking for. A packet sniffer like Ethereal wouldn't help with that.

That leaves me with just a few options: (1) Search engines, where I type in a query and get some answers, (2) Personalized web sites, which learn my behavior and try to present things which seem important to me, or (3) Browser plug-ins, which has some access to the pages I browse and is able to enhance my browsing experience.

Option (1) isn't very pervasive to me, and requires me to formulate a question and then actively look for my answer. I want some tool that could pro-actively suggest answers to me. Option (2) is cool, but unfortunately, only limited to certain sites. So that left me with option (3). I decided to browse Firefox Add-ons to find some extension that might do what I was looking for.

I found just 3 that seemed close enough. Dynamic Web, which suggests similar or related links on a sidebar based on the page I'm currently at, this seems to be a plug-in that just suits my purpose. A question would be how it customizes to users. Yoono is a socially-powered bookmarking engine, relying on user activity and contributions. It seemed promising since it would be able to achieve high quality and accuracy, but requires some critical mass of users. My third option was Webpedia, which essentially gave me a bunch of quick-access links. I was particularly interested in the "best collection of links" and "trends" feature. If it could predict trends for me, perhaps based on my activity, that would be perfect.

A summary of my findings are shown here:

Extension Information
	Dynamic Web	Yoono	Webpedia
Website	http://dynamicweb.csail.mit.edu	http://www.yoono.com	http://webpedia.ourtoolbar.com
Extension Link	Download	Download	Download
Short Description (from Extension Descriptions)	The Dynamic Web extension is an easy to use, side-bar add-on. We dynamically show links related to the page you are currently browsing. These links compete for survival in a Darwinian fashion based on their appeal to the masses! This way we can provide you with exactly what you are looking for without you even asking for it.	Yoono instantly suggests similar sites and people sharing the same interests while you are surfing, for each page you open. Zero effort required - no more tagging, typing keywords or changing interface. Let Yoono bring you the best that others have discovered. Yoono is easy, fun, addictive and designed for everyone.	Webpedia is the toolbar for perfect web explorer: give access to 12 rss feed: del.icio.us popular, digg front page news, furl most popular, hot spurls, listible, megite, newsvine, nowpublic, reddit, slashdot, tailrank and webpedia blog.
Extension Characteristics
	Dynamic Web	Yoono	Webpedia
Has Toolbar	No	Yes	Yes
Has Sidebar	Yes	Yes	No
User Contribution	Yes	Yes	No
Authoritative Contribution	Yes	No	Yes
My Review
	Dynamic Web	Yoono	Webpedia
Accuracy	Score: 4 / 5 Most of its suggested links seem relevant to my current page, and the plug-in seems to have a working system to determine relevant pages. I was impressed by its performance on certain pages, being able to suggest rather relevant sites for some obscure topics. Pages that are recent like news pages, however, seem to fare poorly.	Score: 4 / 5 You can tell the popularity of a suggested site based on the number of users on that site, but for obscure sites, there seems to be some base set of links which are presented. Somewhat relevant but not always. Doesn't work for URLs that are too deep in a domain.	Score: 3 / 5 The plug-in is mainly a bunch of hard-coded authoritative links, which should give accurate content. However, it wasn't able to respond dynamically to my browsing behavior, and to me, it seemed more like a set of trustworthy useful bookmarks.
Usability	Score: 3.5 / 5 Quite painless to get it up and working. I just needed to install it and add a toolbar button and I could pull up the sidebar and see it working. It's somewhat lacking in features, but simple in design.	Score: 4 / 5 I needed to sign up for a user account first, but after that it was pretty easy to start seeing the recommended pages and other users' activity. It is very loaded with cool features, although not all relevant to my quest.	Score: 2 / 5 Choosing the links was easy enough, although it was hard to know what each link provided. Some minor difficulty installing initially, and I also had some problems trying to uninstall the plug-in.
Privacy	Score: 4 / 5 This seems to be an academic project done at MIT, so I believe any personal data revealed should be safe with them. That said, their privacy policy is quite explicit in specifying the data being transmitted to the server. It would be better if they didn't hash any IPs at all.	Score: 2 / 5 Yoono's privacy policy is clear and well-written. However, I didn't like the fact that they disclosed your personal information to other companies in return for some services.	Score: 3.5 / 5 I like this privacy policy best. It is very explicit in stating the information stored or sent to their servers. It addresses fears of spyware and other attacks. However, it didn't uninstall like it claimed to, so I'm not sure if I can trust the rest of the policy.
Overall	Score: 4 / 5 It looks rather promising although I can't say for sure if the results would improve over time. A good point is that it allows user-directed reranking of results that come from some seemingly authoritative and relevant source.	Score: 3.5 / 5 Very well implemented and full of features. It would be good for other uses like social networking, however, I'm primarily concerned with extensions that could somehow read my mind.	Score: 2.5 / 5 Turns out that this plug-in wasn't really what I was looking for. The only dynamic content seemed to be the feeds and link collection, both which are independent of pages I'm trying to find or explore.

So it turns out that current technology is has still quite a bit to go before I will be able to surf with complete ease. There is probably some ongoing research that would actually measure brain waves and use that for controlling the computer, but it has yet to hit mainstream use, and is probably still a few years away from commercialization.

There are a couple of things that I would like to see implemented or improved in all these extensions. First, my ideal kind of extension would have agent-styled interactions. A truly smart and personable character that is not annoying like Microsoft's paperclip, one who is able to monitor my web browsing actions and suggest not just possible sites, but actions I could take too.

Secondly, with regard to user privacy, I want extensions to make explicit all information that they are sending to their central servers. Better still, keep a log on the local machine for clients to view, and allow removal of such information from the server at the user's request.

Finally, customizability is very important in order to suit every user. It would be a disaster to have an agent make the same suggestions to every user. This could bring in more work in the field of personalized web sites, in order to make user-specific recommendations.

If you have suggestions of extensions or features, or comments about this article, please send me an email.