Get title of website via link

My answer is expanding on @AI W's answer of using the title of the page. Below is the code to accomplish what he said.

<?php

function get_title($url){
  $str = file_get_contents($url);
  if(strlen($str)>0){
    $str = trim(preg_replace('/s+/', ' ', $str)); // supports line breaks inside <title>
    preg_match("/<title>(.*)</title>/i",$str,$title); // ignore case
    return $title[1];
  }
}
//Example:
echo get_title("http://www.washingtontimes.com/");

?>

OUTPUT

Washington Times - Politics, Breaking News, US and World News

As you can see, it is not exactly what Google is using, so this leads me to believe that they get a URL's hostname and match it to their own list.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/ => The Washington Times

You want to create slugs, but from experience i can tell you the decode possibilities are limited. For example "Foo - Bar" will become "foo-bar" so how do you then can possibly know that it wasn't "foo bar" or "foo-bar" all along?

Or how about chars that you don't want in your slug and also have no representation for like " ` "? So you can ether use a 1 to 1 converstion like rawurlencode() or you can create a Slug, here is an example for a function - but as i said, no reliable decoding possible - its just in its nature since you have to throw away Information.

function sanitizeStringForUrl($string){
    $string = strtolower($string);
    $string = html_entity_decode($string);
    $string = str_replace(array('ä','ü','ö','ß'),array('ae','ue','oe','ss'),$string);
    $string = preg_replace('#[^wsäüöß]#',null,$string);
    $string = preg_replace('#[s]{2,}#',' ',$string);
    $string = str_replace(array(' '),array('-'),$string);
    return $string;
}

For the regex, use:

document.title = document.title.replace (/[^0-9:]/g, "");

To detect title changes, use MutationObservers, a new HTML5 feature that is implemented in both Google Chrome and Firefox (The two main userscripts browsers).

This complete script will work:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Shakes & Fidget Buffed title shortener
// @namespace   http://släcker.de
// @version     0.1
// @description  Removes the page title of Shakes & Fidget to only display left time if it exists
// @include     *.sfgame.*
// @exclude     www.sfgame.*
// @exclude     sfgame.*
// @copyright   2013+, slaecker, 
// @grant       GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==
/*- The @grant directive is needed to work around a design change
    introduced in GM 1.0.   It restores the sandbox.
*/

var MutationObserver = window.MutationObserver || window.WebKitMutationObserver;
var myObserver       = new MutationObserver (titleChangeDetector);
var obsConfig        = {
    //-- Subtree needed.
    childList: true, characterData: true, subtree: true
};

myObserver.observe (document, obsConfig);

function titleChangeHandler () {
    this.weInitiatedChange      = this.weInitiatedChange || false;
    if (this.weInitiatedChange) {
        this.weInitiatedChange  = false;
        //-- No further action needed
    }
    else {
        this.weInitiatedChange  = true;
        document.title = document.title.replace (/[^0-9:]/g, "");
    }
}

function titleChangeDetector (mutationRecords) {

    mutationRecords.forEach ( function (mutation) {
        //-- Sensible, Firefox
        if (    mutation.type                       == "childList"
            &&  mutation.target.nodeName            == "TITLE"
        ) {
            titleChangeHandler ();
        }
        //-- WTF, Chrome
        else if (mutation.type                      == "characterData"
            &&  mutation.target.parentNode.nodeName == "TITLE"
        ) {
            titleChangeHandler ();
        }
    } );
}

//-- Probably best to wait for first title change, but uncomment the next line if desired.
//titleChangeHandler ();

If you are using some other browser (state that in the question), then fallback to using setInterval().