Looks to be very similar to https://builtwith.com/
1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them).
2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched).
3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;)
4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.
Your extension only works on Chrome, and it is for a feature that is not used commonly. There is no good reason to install it on a web browser.
Installing it in a browser is also a threat that the extension might do more than just scanning sites, and even if it doesn't affect privacy it still encourages installing extra junk on web browsers.
BTW WhatRuns works on all major browsers.
[edit] to be fair other options I tried don't detect the backend at all. This is a single page app with rails api so I get that might be harder than a rails app with server rendering and full page reloads.
No, you are not.
I'll explain.
We use several signals like code snippets, filename, directory name, header info and several others to accurately identify technologies. However, there are many possibilities where this can go wrong even with few signals correct. Every time we detect a technology, we calculate a probability of its accuracy and filter out the rest. This system self-learns and improves the identification over time. Hope this helps.
You are most likely have a system that consumes content, compares that content against known hashed variants. If there is no match, you diff against known variants and check if the output matches any of the 'minimal' implementations.
If you can't match anything, you simply stage that content for a manual review.
On a serious note, I'm with you on how new start-ups go overboard with buzz words. As for WhatRuns, it was intentional that we do not use any jargons to advertise our product on the website, Product Hunt or HackerNews, so that it does not lose its charm.
For a new startup to achieve this scale in technology identification and accuracy compared to established players with more than a decade of development (and data), it is self-evident that manual labour would not yield such a result. In fact, technology breakthroughs and an excellent technical team were the reason why we decided to give this shot in the first place.
We plan to publish a comparative study on our experience with the effectiveness and superior prediction quality of deep learning vs normal pattern identification on our blog (which we will soon move to Medium). Stay tuned! :)
If Whatruns had that feature, I'd seriously consider switching. But otherwise, there's just no way I could. It's way too convenient.
Edit: Looks like I'm probably wrong since I see they have a tool named "Stack Scanner"