A New Search Engine for Finding Similar Web Sites

By Jennifer Martinez | Friday, September 25, 2009 | 10:26 AM PT | 8 comments | 43 tweets retweet »

Similar-site.com is a new search engine that lets you find web sites akin to one you’re interested in by pulling up a list of sites with matching web tags. For example, if you input gigaom.com into the search box on similar-site.com, it will bring up a list of blogs including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and the O’Reilly Radar, all of which share the tags “blog,” “technology” and “Web 2.0.” You can also specify tags that you want the search engine to look for, as well as delete any that you feel may be unrelated. The UI, which mimicks Google’s plain home page, is simple and intuitive.

similar-site

After playing around with the site a bit, I found the search engine largely returned quality results. However, when I tried to find a web site similar to HopStop.com, which helps you find public transit routes in metropolitan cities, I kept getting results for the NYC area even though I deleted that tag from my search. The site is young, however, so it still has room to grow and refine its search capabilities. Other web offerings in the space are SitesLike, Web InSuggest and Similicio.us.

Comments (8)

Tried the site and it seems to be working fine. It returned quality results. Guess it will work better as a browser plugin than an independent site.

AD — 10:59 AM on September 25, 2009

Ahhh… Someone found out what inverted indexing is, and put it in simple site.

Ericson Smith — 11:08 AM on September 25, 2009

I was hoping to see something what Pandora did for Internet Radio. Sadly the results are weaving through some site keywords. They do not appear cohesive and end up being quite disjoint from the searcher’s context.

Rafael Crue — 11:40 AM on September 25, 2009

i use SimilarSites.com

Simi — 2:29 PM on September 25, 2009

I’m also I fan of similarsites.com. Have you downloaded their add-on already?

Steff — 1:28 AM on September 26, 2009

Reply

I don’t even have to visit the site, with a name like, “Similar-site” it’s a guarantee FAIL, period.

Doug — 2:48 PM on September 25, 2009

Check out Xmarks.com for finding similar sites culled from our database of over 800 million bookmarks.

We have great results for HopStop.com: http://www.xmarks.com/s/site/www.hopstop.com/ and millions of other sites.

You can also search by topic and discover the top web sites ranked by bookmark popularity.

-james

James Joaquin — 11:27 PM on September 25, 2009

I tested all of them and I love it, I think it is the future of the internet.
My favorite is http://www.similarsites.com I think the GUI and the resultes are the best there.

Aric — 12:17 PM on September 28, 2009

Linkbacks (3)

[...] » A New Search Engine for Finding Similar Web Sites [...]

Linkwertig: Politik, Feedburner, DRM, Twitter… — 12:01 AM on September 28, 2009

[...] One of the biggest challenges on the web is discovering new types of content. Last week, I wrote about similar-site.com, a web site that helps you find web sites akin to one that you’re currently viewing. We came [...]