Comparison Store for Literally Anything Using the Word “Versus”
Versus is a tiny website that does tiny things and does it really well. Enter a product or service – or anything at all – and Versus will show you alternatives. Find Photoshop and you’ll get comparable Adobe Lightroom and Illustrator products, as well as competitors’ Gimp, Affinity, Procreate, Krita, and Pixlr. This is useful if you often need alternatives to an expensive product or service, especially if you’ve turned Versus into one of your browser’s built-in search engines.
Behind the scenes, Versus simply types Google a search term plus “vs” and sees what Google wants to accomplish for autocomplete. Instead of giving you full Google results with snippets, it returns a clean list of suggested words and phrases so you can browse quickly. You can view any result to find only that word or phrase on Google.
The best way to use Versus is to embed it in your browser. In Chrome, go to settings (Cmd- or ctrl-,), then search for “manage search engines” and click the selected option with the same name. Find the “Add” button. Fill in the menu like this:
Click “Save”. Now you can type “vs” in the address bar, press the space bar and enter whatever you want to search for. So type in “vs Dropbox” and you get a list of Versus: Google Drive, iCloud, Box, OneDrive, Sharepoint, and more. Enter “against Dyson” and get Shark, Bissell, Mile, Molecule, Hoover and Kirby. Enter “vs Duolingo” and get Rosetta Stone, Babbel, Memrise, LingoDeer, and Mango.
You can search for anything, but this method is better for products and services than anything else. I tried to find new music with it, but it really only works for certain popular bands that are often compared to each other, for example, Pink Floyd vs Queen or The Beatles – not entirely undiscovered alternatives. Taylor Swift brings back Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Spotify and Treadmill.
But if you’ve ever tried to memorize a word or concept and know even one wrong answer, that’s great. You can look for Slovenia and get Slovakia, or look for Al Pacino and find Robert De Niro, or look for ambiguous words and speak ambiguously, or look for measles and get rubella. We do not recommend getting rubella.