I am releasing Apotheon on PS4/Steam within a few weeks (waiting on Sony to give me the go-ahead to announce an exact release date) – but when coming back from the holidays I felt burnt out on game dev so I designed to jump back into a old unfinished project I made called Seekr.
I have a lot of unfinished app/game projects, usually done while in the middle of a larger project to get my mind off of it. I came back to this one because I actually find myself using it on a daily basis and haven’t seen any good alternatives pop up.
Seekr is a Chrome extension that works as a reverse search engine. You use it to find web results based on your current URL
Click the Seekr icon when reading an article or browsing a site to see Reddit / Hackernews / Twitter / Facebook / Google+ results of discussions and comments about the URL. It will also display a list of Backlinks (list of sites linking to the URL), website rank information, and various tools such as Wayback Machine (if available) and TinEye (reverse image search). It takes the URL you are viewing, and basically queries a large amount of various APIs to find results based on it.
Martin Brinkmann from Ghacks.net has written a great summary and review on Seekr here.
I find myself using this for a lot of use cases:
- Reading a article / watching a video and want to see discussion around it – Reddit and Twitter discussions
- Finding the source of a bookmarked/saved article (if using a app like Pocket), I can find who shared it or what site I originally found it
- I want to quickly see how popular a domain I just found is. It’s Alexa popularity, Facebook likes, etc
Let me know if you find this useful! I don’t know what additions I might add (getting my own database of backlink data from the Common Crawl project would be great…), though I might look for help and expand it. I primary started this project as a way to learn ASP.net on Azure in 2013, which I am using for Autocraft’s online components.