It doesn’t take long to scour the internet to find products from rather questionable sellers. If you’ve ever searched Amazon, you’ve probably seen at least one product from a company with a gibberish name in all caps. While these brands can be useful for purchasing cool mini gadgets for fun, searching for a product that you need to be reliable only to end up with white label items of questionable quality gets boring quickly. Fortunately, a new browser extension aims to eliminate this mess.
Known simply as Knockoff — Amazon Brand Filter, this browser extension removes “pseudo-brands” that can clog a user’s Amazon search results, leaving only products “with a reputation to lose.” Users can adjust the filter according to their needs, and the extension also determines which brands should start based on several factors. Besides being a free extension, Knockoff has some nice advantages: users don’t need to create an additional account and the entire system runs locally through a browser.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of top-rated Amazon gadgets worth your money, but those who are tired of seeing products from companies whose name seems to be a random string of capital letters will probably get good use out of this extension. As a bonus, the Knockoff extension eliminates paid sponsored ads and promises to never track your data.
Knockoff Browser Extension Eliminates Amazon Product Waste
Available for Google Chrome and Firefox, Knockoff is a Fair Source (FSL) web extension that works with any Amazon marketplace worldwide. Aimed at filtering anonymous garbage from search queries, Knockoff checks brands against a list of 5,000 approved names and relies on a set of linguistic rules to determine whether a company is up to par. This includes checking for capitalized names, missing vowels, and even names that can’t be pronounced.
Users can filter listings so suspicious products stay hidden (revealed with a single click), stay hidden until hovered over, or simply display a warning bullet so users know a brand may be overlayed. There are also three different levels of screening: relaxed, which focuses on “high profile offenders”; standard, which includes unbranded and suspiciously branded ads; and strict, which only allows approved brands. The extension also updates daily via an open network request (the only one it makes) to refresh the list of suspects.
Additionally, users can also choose to block or trust any brand directly from the results page. The team behind the extension has made their work available on GitHub for those who want to check their homework or even contribute. Knockoff even promises that all fixes will reach every user. Since there are already products you might not want to buy on Amazon, those who are tired of endlessly scrolling through a minefield of unwanted products might finally find what they’re actually looking for.
