Show HN: Google Sheets add-on to compare text, fuzzy-match, highlight duplicates
At its core, Flookup is a fuzzy matching add-on that helps you manage text that is less than a 100% match. Beyond that it can be used to:
1. Search for and match data regardless of whether it contains typos.
2. Highlight and delete duplicates duplicates even if the data has mismatched text.
3. Calculate the percentage similarity between strings.
4. Extract unique values from any column based on percentage similarity.
5. Sum and find the average of numbers based on corresponding partial matches.
Because of its versatility, Flookup can be used to return the best match, the next best match, etc. until the minimum percentage similarity is reached. This feature avoids weaknesses other fuzzy matching algorithms have because it safely hands power to the user, and I believe the user is the best judge of which data is a match or not.
Another great feature Flookup has is that it can be used to combine lookup values. This is particularly helpful when your data has many similar strings and you want to add extra information to your lookup value in order to increase the specificity of your query.
Finally, Flookup is good for more than just fuzzy matching; it is the improved replacement for VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH that you have been looking for.
Find out more by heading to https://www.getflookup.com, Subscription information is available at https://www.getflookup.com/pricing
27 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadI see what you did there
My use case is a bit different -- I was doing a lot of database cleanups, particularly CRMs. I rewrote/reused code to build a duplicate detector a number of times; always wish there were a service that I could send data to, and it would flag my dupes. Even was using human labelers to train domain specific models.
Specific models might be an interesting addon. Address parsing, normalization, and deduplication (with potential covariates like phone number, email address, etc.) is a massive pain in the ass for any data engineer who works with sales or marketing folks. Their databases (CRMs) are awful -- it was always a chore to clean these up, but measurably saved money (imagine you mail physical cards, and only want 1 per customer... but you have 5 different contacts at that company for 3 unique individuals).
I would have paid for a deduplication service -- say, quarterly batches at somewhere >$500/quarter for e.g. 20-50k contacts.
The 1-size-fits-all isn't really a value add for me, that wasn't so much my issue. For other target users, I can see that use -- for them, the interface is the value add. Especially if you can read/write Excel files directly.
Stop words aren't something I used in my deduplication efforts. How many of your users request or use this? What kind of stop words do you want to exclude from comparing two entries? I would be worried that stopwords still carry information: "The Store" versus "Store" might be significant.
You have interesting insights, especially about the value deduplication offers. In fact, apps similar to mine charge in the thousands for an annual subscription. I didn't know how much of a pain it was until I released my first paid version last year.
As for the stop words: A significant number of my users either asked for it or presented me with issues that could be solved by removing certain irrelevant text. I don't track usage patterns and such so I added the feature based on this feedback, fully trusting that the users could identify the stop words correctly.
Some of these words might be anything from TLDs to definite articles like "the"; it all depends on the user. Sometimes it's a simple word like "very" or "best", etc., and, based on the data they've shared with me, it looks like the feature was a welcome addition to Flookup.
I used the Levenshtein edit distance to generate a list of potentials for human review - I extended MySQL to have a Levenshtein distance function for speed.
The fact that there is a tutorial and pricing prominent in the menu, makes this better than 80% of landing pages I run across, easily. That appeals more to me than any number of hipster beards.
I liked the landing page. It gave the what and the why of the tool in a clear way - and but still had some actual technical details.
They might be unconventional decisions but I think they work quite nicely.
I don't really care about the face of people that made projects, I prefer a website to describe the project itself, why they used this or this technology, why they made the design choices they made.
Thanks for the comment.
I wouldn't mind a 'about us'/'about the team'/'about me'-page linked in the footer, or as part of a 'contact us' page, or something.
But I don't think it needs to be pushed very hard, and definitely don't place the 'about us' on the landing page.
It used to be way more "restrictive" than that, until yesterday when my unscientific analysis prompted me to make the change to 50. At this level, I felt that many users would be able to get some work done and properly test Flookup at the same time.
Of course there might be some more room for expansion and I'm willing to do it depending on user feedback and more research.
The subscription model is especially for those who might not want to own the product forever; like those who want to use it for a couple of months to a year and quit. Since its launch, I have seen the majority of new subscriptions shift from the monthly to the annual. And now, as of the start of this year, I have seen a bump in the lifetime subscriptions.
The other great thing about subscriptions is that you, the user, get lifetime updates/support/upgrades.
Good luck with your project!
Hehehe! #JustKidding ;)