I have been looking at various ways to find similar sites to the one specified: there are tools that analyze visitors’ behavior and generate the list of resources people also like to visit (Alexa.co), there are tools that analyze users’ bookmarking preferences and generate the list of sites having similar tags when bookmarked (Delicious and FoxMarks).
"Similar site" is the tool that is also "mainly based on user annotations or tags on websites". While that remained not really clear to me which database the tool is using (probably it’s own) but I found the results intriguing enough to share with our readers (the interface may look a bit simplistic but the actual job seems pretty well done).
So: type in any page URL and hit "Search". The results page returned contains the following (useful) information:
- The confidence level (more about this one below);
- The most frequent tags used for the page (you can exclude any or add your own to refine the results);
- The list of similar sites;
- Most frequent tags characterizing each page in the list;
- The similarity score (how similar each page appears to be to the base one, in %);
- The quick button to find similar pages to each one in the list.
Thus the accuracy of results returned is basically defined by 2 main factors:
- The combination of tags;
- The level of confidence.
The level of confidence is the grade given to each page depending on how many users tagged it (obviously the fewer people tagged the page, the less probable it is that the page has most relevant tags, thus the lower the level, the worse the results returned):
- very low : The site being searched has been tagged less than 5 times. Fulltext search is used.
- low : The site being searched has been tagged less than 50 times. Tag based searched is used.
- medium : The site being searched has been tagged less than 100 times. Tag based searched is used.
- high : The site being searched has been tagged more than 100 times. Tag based searched is used.
The free tool was reviewed under SEJ disclaimer.
