There are millions of websites, but how do you find them? Searching with Google or Bing is an obvious method, but there is an alternative. Here’s how to find sites like your favourites.
Many people know the popular sites for news, sport, their favourite hobby or interest and so on, but obviously these are not the only sites that cover these topics and there are always many more alternatives. In fact, some of the alternatives may be even better, but how do you find them?
Here are two Chrome extensions that list alternatives to any website you view.
Another use for finding alternative sites is to discover competitors. For example, if you have a website or blog and want to know who your competitors are, you can find similar sites with a Chrome extension.
Similar Sites - Discover Related Websites
Go to the Chrome Web Store using Google Chrome and search for ‘similar sites’. Three results turn up and here is the first one, Similar Sites - Discover Related Websites. It adds a round globe-like button to the toolbar in the top right corner of the browser.
Just browse the web as you normally do and when you want to discover more websites like the one you are currently viewing, just click the toolbar button. A panel is displayed on the right that lists alternative websites that are just like the one you are viewing.
Sometimes there are no known alternatives, but often there are many just like the one you are on. At the top are the site topics and below are thumbnail images of the sites, descriptions, location/language and URL.
There is also useful information like the global rank and the monthly visitor numbers. This enables you to see which of the alternative websites are the most popular.
A tiny icon next to the URL, which is easily missed, opens the site in a new tab. You can quickly go through the list, see which sites you like and open them in a bunch of tabs so you can check them out.
Clicking anywhere else, like the site thumbnail, opens a new tab and performs a fresh related sites search on the selected site. You can therefore dig a little deeper and get alternative sites to the alternative site. This makes it easy to discover sites you may not know about.
This is an excellent extension for Chrome for helping you discover new websites - alternatives to the ones you usually browse.
The extension shows sites in a panel, but I find the text a bit too small for comfort, but it is a convenient way to show alternatives and it also shows ranking and visitor numbers.
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