SuperSelect is a Chrome extension supporting super-fast selection of text and data from web pages.
Ctl+C and Ctl+V work well in many cases, but SuperSelect is designed to work
at scale, when you need to select and extract structured data from the web repeatedly.
You can discover how SuperSelect works and play with some of its capabilities before installing it. Just read on.
At the bottom right of this screen you will see the SuperSelect controls. They look like this:
These controls are available on all web pages when the extension is installed (& enabled).
The Overlay
The SuperSelect Overlay is like a piece of glass laid over the current web page. Interactions with the page are prevented by the glass — only selections are enabled.
To turn on the Overlay, we simply press the "Z" key. (We could also click the "Overlay" toggle in the controls but the keyboard is faster.)
Enable the Overlay now by pressing the "Z" key. You should see a tinted Overlay and a blue border appear. Pressing the "Z" key again should toggle the Overlay Off.
Consider pressing the "Z" key 1,000 times until you understand how this works :)
Selecting Stuff
Once the Overlay is On selecting text is just a matter of clicking the start and end positions of the text you wish to select.
Go ahead and click the beginning and end of this sentence to select it. First make sure the Overlay is On!
The Buffer
As you make selections you'll see that they appear above the SuperSelect control. This area is called the Buffer.
All selections appear in the Buffer until the Buffer is saved.
You can save the Buffer by clicking on the icon in the controls or by pressing the "S" key.
At any time you can remove selections from your Buffer by clicking the appropriate icon.
You Try
One trivial use case for SimpleSelect is collecting information to pull into a flash card application (such as Anki.)
For example, let's say you want to collect words from a dictionary website to add to your Vocabulary flash card deck:
- Word of the Day
- mondegreen
- noun; mon-di-green
- a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard, especially a song lyric.
- Example Sentence
- "There's a bathroom on the right" is a mondegreen of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "There's a bad moon on the rise."
Let's grab this word and all its related data using SuperSelect.
First, make sure the Overlay is enabled. (Press "Z" until the blue border appears.)
Then click on the word "mondegreen" once and then once again. Then click on the word "a" right before "misinterpretation" and complete the selection by clicking on "lyric".
The Workspace
You should see your selections in the SuperSelect buffer. Normally at this point you would press "S" or click to save your selections but this is a demo, and Save does nothing.
The extension when installed, however, will persist all of your Saved selections to a backend spreadsheet table called the Workspace where the data can be edited and exported out to any application or processor that you like.
Each Save of the Buffer creates a new row in the backend spreadsheet table, like this:
| 0 | 1 | 2 | source |
|---|---|---|---|
| mondegreen | a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard, especially a song lyric. | "There's a bathroom on the right" is a mondegreen of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "There's a bad moon on the rise." | http://superselect.rocks |
That's It?
That's it!
But the use cases for SuperSelect are endless — capturing data for flash cards, recipes, crafting machine learning training data sets from the web, extracting semantic data from blogs, etc. — anytime you want to quickly select a bunch of data from the web.