Getting started, fixing the things that usually go wrong, and writing patterns of your own. If none of this covers it, email us — a person reads it.
Prospekt works from the moment it's installed. There is nothing to configure.
Install and pin it. Click the puzzle-piece icon in Chrome's toolbar and pin Prospekt, so you can see the badge as you browse.
Browse normally. Every page you open is read as it loads. The toolbar popup shows what the current page gave up.
Act before you leave. Copy a single value, copy everything new, or export the page — all from the popup.
Open the dashboard when you want the whole collection: filter it, select in bulk, and export as CSV.
Almost always one of five things.
Check the pill in the top-right of the popup. If it reads Paused rather than Live, click it. The same toggle sits at the bottom of the dashboard sidebar.
The popup will say so directly. Mail, documents and messaging domains are skipped by default. Remove the domain under Settings → Filter lists → Skip domains, or use Scan this page once in the popup.
Single-page apps often render content after the initial load. Press the rescan button in the popup — the circular arrow next to Export — once the content you want is on screen.
Some sites publish addresses as pictures specifically to defeat extraction. Prospekt reads text only and does not perform OCR, so there is nothing for it to match.
Check Junk email domains and Junk email
prefixes in Settings. Addresses like info@ and
noreply@ are dropped by default — remove the prefix from the list if you
want them kept.
Usually a pattern that's matching more than you intended.
Open Insights → Pattern performance. Each pattern shows its match count, when it last fired, and a health note. A pattern flagged as unhealthy is the place to start — the phone pattern in particular can pick up dates and reference numbers on some sites.
Then go to Settings, click Test on that pattern, and paste in a page's text. Matches highlight live as you edit the expression, so you can tighten it until only the right things light up.
Two quick wins that need no regex at all:
info@-style results without deleting them.Anything you can express as a JavaScript regular expression.
Go to Settings → Custom patterns → Add custom pattern. Give it a label,
an expression and flags. Matches are stored with the custom type and can be
filtered separately everywhere in the dashboard.
Ticket IDs TCK-\d{5}
Product SKUs SKU-\d{4}-[A-Z]{2}
UK VAT GB\d{9}
BTC address \b(bc1|[13])[a-zA-HJ-NP-Z0-9]{25,39}\b
Flags default to g, which finds every match rather than just the first. Add
i to ignore case. Always open the tester before saving — an over-broad pattern
can fill your collection quickly, and saving triggers a rescan of every open tab.
Everything, or exactly the slice you want.
Files are UTF-8 CSV with a header row, and open directly in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers. Each row carries the value, type, domain, source page and dates.
Two caps, both adjustable, both there to protect your browser.
Maximum stored domains (default 5,000) limits scan records. Past the limit the oldest records are dropped — your contacts are never touched. Maximum stored contacts (default 20,000) caps the collection itself; at the limit, new contacts stop being saved rather than overwriting old ones.
Current usage against both is shown in Settings, and on the Scan history page. If you're approaching the contact limit, export first, then clear what you no longer need.
No. Everything is stored locally in one browser profile. To move a collection, export the CSV. To move your configuration, use Export settings in the Settings header and import the file on the other machine.
Scanning runs once per page load against text already in memory, and typically finishes in a few milliseconds. If you notice a slowdown on a specific site, tell us which one — an unbounded custom pattern is the usual cause.
Prospekt is a Chromium extension, so it generally installs and runs on Chromium-based browsers from the Chrome Web Store. We test on Chrome; other browsers are unsupported but usually fine.
Chrome removes all of the extension's stored data along with it — contacts, scan history and settings. Export anything you want to keep first, because we hold no copy and cannot restore it.
That depends on where you and your recipients are. Contact details of identifiable people are personal data under GDPR and similar laws, and outreach is regulated separately again. Prospekt sends nothing on your behalf — please check your own obligations first. See the privacy policy.
The more of this you can give us, the faster it gets fixed.
Email us with what you have. Prospekt is free, but support isn't an afterthought — we answer everything.
contact@ursacode.com