Show HN: Google Sheets add-on to compare text, fuzzy-match, highlight duplicates | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Google Sheets add-on to compare text, fuzzy-match, highlight duplicates

80 pointschiscript27 comments

I created an add-on for Google Sheets called Flookup, and it comes both as a free version and a VERY AFFORDABLE paid version.

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

I've had a similar idea in the back of my mind for a few years now. Congrats on launching!

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.

I see... There are other solutions that claim to use A.I to train or generate models for their their apps. I'm not really sure how effective they are though. That said, however, Flookup can help you flag dupes quite well. There are many ways I tried to shore up the fact that no algorithm is a one-size-fits all solution. For example, Flookup allows you to dictate what stop words to remove or combine lookup variables for more specificity or even return the next best match in case the first one isn't to your liking. All this makes it quite malleable and usable for a case like yours.

Thanks for replying! I don't tend to do that type of work anymore, but I'm still stoked to see a solution to the problem I had frequently. I think there's a great service to be built (and maybe it's yours!) that deduplicates data.

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.

I hope that service is mine. I'm really pushing to get more users on board this year.

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 have done something similar to help with building negatives for an Adwords campaign for Centre Parcs in the UK

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.

Why is so hard to introduce the people who made this tool on the website? If I spent money on something I want to know to whom I sent this money. It feels really weird to use an anonymous tool for something which might be important.

Hard disagree. A prominent 'meet the team', complete with smiling, rounded, portrait photos will usually make me close the tab.

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.

Your comments are much appreciated!

Hard disagree to your disagree. I don't want it at the top of the screen, but I don't mind scrolling down and seeing those smiling faces.

Thanks for the feedback. I might add a something soon but I'm not anonymous at all. My name and (relevant) story are quite easy to get on the web but I did not want to take away from the product on the website itself.

It is not really about an about page, even though I think it is important to have one. It is about when I use a service or even more so if I pay for one, I at least want a name and a country where my data is being processed. It might sound old fashioned but I just like to know who I'm trusting.

Country is in the feedback form (UK). I outsourced info about me and the thinking behind Flookup to Indie Hackers (link is on the landing page).

They might be unconventional decisions but I think they work quite nicely.

"introducing" people that worked on something on a website usually puts me off. Every corporate website you'll find today has a "team" page with some people with fake smiles.

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.

I would never have imagined that there would be visitors who actually dislike those intro pages hehehe! This is enlightening and will definitely affect how (if?) I implement it in future.

Thanks for the comment.

I know I objected pretty strongly to this in my other 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.

I feel it is particularity true for [tech / engineer] people, which usually prioritize [relevant / accurate / straight to the point] information over [marketing / feelings].

That's something for an "about" page. I absolutely don't care about that when I'm learning about a product or pricing, and there's no guarantee any of it is real anyway.

Congrats for launching a useful tool and already gathering a nice install base. Wonder how much of it is paid :)). Base plan looks a bit too restrictive - people can process 50 rows manually in xls -I suggest you offer more rows for the free plan, so you encourage adoption.

Thanks for your suggestion.

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.

This reminded me of https://openrefine.org/.

Good luck with your project!

Ssshhhhhh! Don't tell them about it!

Hehehe! #JustKidding ;)

Congrats on the launch and i hope you make money quickly enough before Google launches this as a built-in feature.

Hahaha! The horror!

> 2. Highlight and delete duplicates duplicates even if the data has mismatched text.

I see what you did there

Hehehe! I try my best

Why did you choose a subscription model over a fixed price one?

There is a fixed price for those who want it.

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.

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