There is more news on the browser front than the release of Google’s Chrome and Microsoft giving a complete makeover to its dominant Internet Explorer with Version 8 Beta 2.

Opera Software is leading a first-of-its-kind project to create a search engine that tracks how Web pages are structured on the Web. This engine will help browser makers and standard bodies work towards a more standards-driven and compatible Web.

Opera today announced results from its MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) search engine, a brainchild of Opera engineers that indexes the markup, style, scripting and the technology used while creating Web pages.

From the beginning, Opera is known as an innovative company and MAMA is proof of its understanding of the Web, claimed the company.

The MAMA search engine scours 3.5 million Web pages, and the resulting data can answer questions such as “can I get a sampling of Web pages that have more than 100 hyperlinks?” or “what does an average Web page look like?”– a dream come true for Web developers.

“The Web is fragmented, complex and always evolving. MAMA’s vast database provides us with detailed information about how Web technologies are used,” said Snorre M Grimsby, vice-president of quality assurance at Opera Software. “This is key in our efforts to test and ensure high-quality compatibility, stability and performance of our products, and we want to share it with our peers, so they can benefit from it too.”

MAMA will help Web developers find examples of usage of features and functions, look at trends and gather data to justify technology to their clients or managers. This will also encourage standards bodies to take into account developers’ suggestions about what is happening on the Web in reality and will eventually raise the quality and interoperability of specifications, the Web and browsers.

MAMA can also respond to queries as general as “how many sites use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)?” (80.4 per cent of MAMA’s URLs), or “how many markup errors does the average Web page have?” (47), or “how many characters does an average Web page have?” (16,400), to more specific queries such as “which country is using XMLHttpRequest, a critical component of AJAX, the most?” (Norway, with 10.2 per cent, within MAMA’s URL set).

The company claims MAMA is up to the task of tackling vague questions that don’t have easy answers, like “how many sites are mobile-ready?” or “how prevalent is Web 2.0?” Defining a page as being “Web 2.0″ can cover a variety of sub-topics, including the use of micro formats, RSS feeds, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and AJAX among numerous other criteria. MAMA is ready to provide the complex answers to indistinct questions where simple answers do not exist.

According to Grimsby, MAMA is an evolving project, and it will continue to provide statistics such as the ones above to help monitor trends and provide real-world, practical samples of the Web developer’s “art,” for inspiration and instruction.

That claims may be more credible than some other companies because Opera Software ASA has redefined Web browsing for PCs, but even more so for mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera’s cross-platform Web browser technology is known for its performance and small size, while giving users a breezy online experience.