Text Reliability Assessment von clenoble

Crabe reads the text on a web page and tells you what kind of writing it is, who published it, what independent sources say about them, and whether the page's own links actually go anywhere.

It never gives you a single score. It gives you four separate axes, and every finding states how strong its own evidence is.

WHY THAT MATTERS

There is a difference between "we fetched this and checked it", "you can open these sources yourself", "this is a judgement about text on your screen" and "the model remembers this and nothing here can verify it". Most tools present all four the same way. Crabe labels each one, in writing, and refuses to let a finding claim more support than it has.

An axis that could not run says why. It never reports zero. "We could not look" and "we looked and it was bad" stay different statements all the way to the screen.

WHAT IT CHECKS

• What the text does — classified as Factual, Opinion or Fiction, then scored only against the rubric for that category.
• Who published it — the byline and date declared in the page, plus what the model knows about the author and publisher, marked as recall.
• What other sources say — lateral reading: independent sources on the publisher and the central claim, with links you can open.
• Whether its links work — each outbound link in the article is fetched and its real outcome reported. A page that names its sources and links none of them is told to you plainly.

The rubrics are readable inside the extension, and so is the complete instruction sent to the model, word for word. What scored your page is what you can read.

YOU NEED YOUR OWN AI KEY

Crabe has no server and no account. It uses an API key you provide, and you are billed by that provider, not by us:

• Anthropic Claude — its web search returns durable source links.
• Google Gemini — has a free tier. Its search citations are redirect links that expire and cannot be checked automatically, and Crabe labels them as such.
• A local model through Ollama — the page's text never leaves your machine. Lateral reading is then unavailable, because a local model has no web search tool, and Crabe says so rather than quietly using a cloud provider you did not choose. Citation checking, if you switch it on, still contacts the sites the page links to: that is what checking a link means, and it is true of every provider.

PRIVACY

No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts, no server. There is nothing to phone home to.

Analysis only happens when you click, on the page you are looking at. The two kinds of outgoing request beyond your chosen provider — the search query for lateral reading, and the requests to the page's own links — are each behind their own switch, off until you turn them on, and each switch states what is sent and to whom. A withheld switch is enforced before a network connection is opened.

Your API keys are kept on the machine you entered them on and excluded from browser sync, so they are never copied to Google's or Mozilla's servers.

The text of an analysed page is never written to disk. Every stylesheet and script is bundled: opening the settings page contacts nobody.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Crabe supports critical judgement; it does not replace it. Every result says so, and means it: read the page critically, and read the assessment critically too. Any model can be confidently wrong — comparing two of them on the same page is the cheapest way to see that for yourself.

Crabe assesses text only. It does not evaluate images, video or audio — including whether they are authentic, current, or shown in their original context. That limit is deliberate, it is stated on every result, and the evidence for the decision is published in the repository.

It also does not tell you whether something is true. It tells you what the page supports, who stands behind it, and what you can check for yourself.

OPEN SOURCE

AGPL-3.0. The network-copyleft clause forecloses turning this into a closed hosted service. Source, architecture notes and the full reasoning behind what was built and what was dropped:
https://github.com/clenoble/crabe