This will be of particular interest to blog and media site owners. Anyone who has either of those kinds of sites will understand that importance of networking with (or keeping track of) sites that are on a similar subject line.
SimilarSites.com (not to be confused with SimilarSites.net, which I find to be useless) lets you search for a domain name and find sites with similar keywords/phrases in their makeup so you can easily find websites that are similar to the one you’re own (or the one you’re using as your search).
The site is free and pretty useful for a specific niche of Web user. Unlike other sites along a similar vein like similicio.us (hit and miss at best) and TagOMatic (which rarely returns anything useful), SimilarSites.com actually seems to work. It replaces the old, reliable, but questionable results of a pure Google search with a list of almost entirely useful returns.
The site is free to use and has a nice little browser plug-in for Firefox and IE to make searching even easier. One thing I think that SimilarSites.com is missing is the ability to search for similar articles or site sections, since the search always boils down to just the domain.
Of course, SimilarSites.com is focused on finding like domains, but I feel the site would be much more useful if I could find related focuses amongst very large sites. If, for instance, I wanted to find other hardware reviews like I peruse at PCmag.com (pcmag.com/category2/) from different sites around the Web, SimilarSites.com is of no help.
For what it’s made for, though, I have yet to find a better way to find like-minded websites than with SimilarSites.com. There are plenty of hopefuls out there that try to do the same thing, but so far none are better.
It’s free to use and has been around since 2007, so it’s nto a fly-by-night newbie or from a questionable background. The plugin is also nifty since it takes the typing (or cut-and-pasting) out of the search, allowing you to just click the button on your browser to immediately SimilarSites.com websites related to the one you’re on.
Worth a try, at least, and definitely useful to the researchers, marketers, and bloggers out there.
