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Surf Canyon, a Firefox browser add-on that helps you find more relevant search results, can now help you search for jobs, apartments and more on Craigslist. The Oakland, Calif. startup's goal is to help users locate the search results they want without having to repeatedly tweak their query. Once you've installed Surf Canyon, a bull's eye appears next to your search results in Google, Yahoo or MSN. When you see a result that's close to what you're looking for, you can click on the bull's eye, and the add-on will show you additional recommendations -- based on that selection, as well previous selections and searches during the same session -- from elsewhere in your search results. The company's latest release, which is available on SurfCanyon.com today, and should be on the Mozilla website tomorrow, takes this approach beyond general search engines and into e-commerce. Not only does the add-on provide recommendations in Craigslist, it also previews the images included in the listings. I've played with Surf Canyon's new release, and there are a few hiccups in its Craigslist integration, probably because the listings themselves don't always have much information. For example, when I clicked on a "charming" apartment in Redwood City, the add-on recommended another apartment in a different city with a different number of bedrooms asking for a different price -- but hey, it was also described as "charming." Okay, so I'm picking on the most egregiously silly example. Most of the other results were pretty useful and relevant.

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Moving into Craigslist is an interesting way to expand. There's definitely a use for Surf Canyon there, and it probably opens up more opportunities for the company's business strategy of presenting sponsored links within its recommendations. It also helps Surf Canyon become even more tempting against other companies that try to improve your search experience, like ManagedQ. (One of the more high-profile efforts in this area, Yahoo's SearchMonkey initiative, probably won't lead to much direct competition, since the new applications don't reorder your search results, and are limited to Yahoo search.)

The new release also includes support for Firefox 3, whose final version will be available on June 17. That's a smart improvement, but selfishly, I have to ask: What about Camino?

Last month, Surf Canyon raised a $600,000 seed round.