Silver Dollar Autor: Jarrod West

Silver Dollar

Eucalyptus Cinerea, a.k.a. The Silver Dollar Gum, is a species of gum tree known for being particularly small and compact

Overview

The practice of spamdexing is alive and well on gumtree.com.au, with unscrupulous sellers able to manipulate search results by adding a serious of keyword "tags" at the end of their description.

This appears to be especially egregious from car dealerships, and so searching for a specific make of car often requires wading through a huge number of entirely unrelated listings.

This extension aims to resolve that by detecting and hiding these suspect results, leaving the user free to concentrate on what they're actually looking for.

How it works

As each page loads, the extension will parse the contents and determine whether the listing matches the search. It does this by considering the title against each word in the search query, using fuzzy logic to allow imperfect matches.

If a listing fails to meet the required match threshold, rather than being removed entirely it will be rendered mostly transparent. This allows the user to easily skim past these listings, while still allowing them to be viewed if desired.

See the screenshot for an example (note that this screenshot has had some identifying features from both result sets blurred for privacy).