The chance is high that you know and visit several websites of a specific niche that you are interested in. If you know Ghacks for instance, you may also know Freeware Genius, Make Use Of, Lifehacker or Download Squad. But sometimes sites slip just past you, and you do not know what you are missing until you discover them.
The Firefox add-on Similar Web reduces the time it takes to discover related sites by offering suggestions in the web browser. It will by default display related sites in a small sidebar on the left, the display can be changed to the right sidebar or a toolbar button easily in the options.
similar sites
The related sites are displayed with a thumbnail image, their page title and url. A click on an item opens it in the same tab by default. This can be changed in the settings so that each new site is opened in a new tab instead. The usual double-click to open a link in a new tab works however as well.
But Similar Web can not only display related websites. It can also display articles about the active site, or recent Twiter buzz about the site.
The suggested sites are often spot on, especially when popular websites are accessed. The tool seems to have more difficulties in finding related sites for niche sites where it may not offer any suggestions.
The suggestions are not limited to English websites. Our tests with German sites revealed solid results as well. Users can suggest similar sites, and vote for existing sites by moving the mouse over the thumbnail image.
Lastly, it is possible to stop the add-on at any time by clicking on its status bar icon, which unfortunately is placed at the left side of the status bar, a highly unusual place, especially since it stays on the left side of the status messages that are displayed in the status bar. The icon can be disabled in the add-on’s options.
Similar Web makes it a lot easier to discover related websites on the Internet. Firefox users can download and install the add-on via the official Firefox add-on repository. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3.x versions, but not the latest 4.x releases, at least not officially.
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Thanks alot for the share! it makes web surfing really cool, i can easily find the same niche websites more easily!
i am now surfing an hour or so with this extension and when i go to national orientated websites, other than english, you get some very strange links.
Let me give an example a computer website and the link being a catholic (and look a likes ) website(s) i really do not see the connection between those to. And even with English/American websites i am not really getting some of the related links.
Paulus it largely depends how those related sites are added, it seems as if users can suggest sites. Not sure if there is a manual approval process or if they just assume the sites are related that are suggested. That might explain the unrelated sites in the suggestions.
I was using this for months and gaining a lot of useful information using this addon
I’ve known this extension for some time now, but always hesitated to try it. This article got me decided, and it’s worth it. Nice add-on (eve though the ‘extensions.similarweb.gSessionId’ reference, you can change it in about:config, choose ‘reset’ makes the value blank, new different value recreated afterwards). Nice add-on.