What is a strategy to implement this URL input analysis feature?

I found this cool feature on digg.com, where you can input a news URL and it will nearly instantaneously give you the title, the summary, and the image from the news story.

I don't need all these features but I would like to abstract out just the title.

I don't have the resources to download the entire website and say parse it for this information but was wondering if there was a way to get just the title ... using the client's machine, i.e. browser.

Is there an API available that might help with this?

The similar feature is found at digg.com/news after hitting the add button at the top:

Solution 1:

I don't have the resources to download the entire website and say parse it for this information

That would be the reliable way to do it.

You could get a performance boost by downloading only the first 𝒩 bytes of the page (by making a range request, but you risk missing the <title> element if it exists beyond those bytes.

if there was a way to get just the title ... using the client's machine, i.e. browser.

No. The same origin policy prevents this.