QuarkRank is a Delhi based startup (by IIT Bombay grads) that provides contextual information for making decisions at the point of purchase.
In their own words:
“QuarkRank is an intelligent engine which crawls the web for opinions on various products/services and automatically summarize them feature-by-feature using its natural language processing technique. ”
Essentially, QuarkRank recommends products/services based on your preferences and aggregates reviews/opinions about the product across the Internet.
“QuarkRank tears apart millions of reviews and separates out useful information which will help online consumers as well as sellers.”
QuarkRank has released their APIs which can be used to access their repository of summarized reviews – an example is QuarkShop, which is a comparison engine and can be used to find product of your choice based on opinions across the Internet.
Here is how it works:
Say, you want to buy a cell phone. You can enter the relevant parameters that are important to you (camera/video..etc), choose the preferred brand and price range – and QuarkShop will suggest you a product with relevant content like
- Top features
- Worst features
- Specifications
- Reviews (data fetched from CNet review, amazon.com, epinions, pc mag, pricegrabber, newegg and circuitcity),
- Price Comparison
You can also compare products – feature by feature, for e.g. iPod vs. Zune
QuarkRank is a self-funded startup and is started by Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora.
It won’t be wrong to say that QuarkRank is defining the next generation in online shopping – right from aggregating reviews/comparison across the www, to assissting customers in buying products.
What’s your take on QuarkRank? I am damn impressed!
tags: quarkrank, quarkshop
I’m not sure if it’s just me, I couldn’t make out what this site does, the interface is very user unfriendly..
@Rishi – I understand your confusion. For clarity sake, check out the implementation of their apis @ QuarkShop.com
Hi Rishi,
Quarkshop has been made so that you don’t need to visit a lot of pages to find the best product for YOU. For example,
1. go to http://www.quarkshop.com/cameras
2. fill out the ‘find by section’, press submit
3. you will get best 3 matched products on the right hand side.
4. click compare button for graphical comparison
it can be a little complex to start with … as its a new concept in online shopping.
QuarkRank is an awesome concept..I couldn’t stop playing with their site. will surely try out their apis.
They shd target e-com sites (not the Indian sites) and maybe add digg style interactivity in prod review sections?
It is so hard to read, I have to look for content in the mess of ads in here?
Pingback: A Weird Soul
Pingback: Gaurav Sharma - A Weird Soul » Blog Archive » QuarkRank and QuarkShop
Ritesh,
I get the basic concept, but just 3 or 4 categories at quarkshop and just 3 recommendations? I don’t like things being thrust upon me, I would like to compare 20 different models before making a decision.. can I?
Come to think of it, if you recommend Canon Powershot A570is when my preference is design in a camera in 200-400$ range.. there is something inherently wrong with your rankings too. It’s a ugly looking camera IMHO. That brings us to another important point, how do you establish trust among your consumers?
Also, whats with the tag thingy.. flatpaneltv’s .. I know tags are good, but in their own place, not everywhere, Human readable categories are preferable over here..
Another point, I have 1024 X 768 resolution (perhaps the most common resolution) on my laptop, I just see almost half of the graph in step 3 and just ‘Go’ of the ‘Go to camera’ button, and the list of tags is below the bottom level of my screen, isn’t it bad UI or what?
There’s no way of UGC too, your users could have opinions too.. can’t they?
Looking at any page, half of it is blank white.. such a waste of precious screen real estate, things that could have been accommodated in a single view requires scrolling by the user, not a good design at all.
I’d hire a usability expert rather than seeing a good concept being wasted away just by bad presentation.
Rishi
I am not very bothered with the unintuitive layout of the homepage and low inventory. I guess it’s only a matter of time. What bothers me is that they are only crawling reviews. Now reviews are generally not-so-unbiased opinions. You write review when you absolutely love the product or hate it. You never write review for mediocre products. To support the argument, count the number of reviews of a very common but average product and compare that with the number of reviews of a better product. So aggregation of reviews can mostly give you biased numbers which is what QuarkRank all about. Though I am not dead against the idea. Something is better than nothing, but it is not the most ideal way.
‘There’s no way of UGC too, your users could have opinions too.. can’t they?’
@Rishi – I don’t know why they don’t accept user reviews, but some of the companies provide you with their API for reviews if you are NOT accepting UGC.
Google was using Yelp’s reviews and they recently started collecting their own reviews. This is against Yelp’s TOS and Yelp booted Google from using their reviews.
Guys,
QUarkShop is sort of PoC for the main product, i.e. QuarkRank.
@Rishi/Abhishek – yes, users can and will have opinions – but QuarkShop is not a full fledged e-commerce store, it’s meant to showcase how one can exploit the apis.
Ritesh/Nakul : Let me know if I am wrong.
QuarkRank, will instead sell these apis to global e-com sites..
Ashish, you are absolutely right. Building a shopping site requires a lot of effort and time for global market, its a matured space. Instead we are targeting e-com sites.
Nice attempt . i must say . this space is really hot @ Barcamp Delhi there was a demo of
http://www.reviewgist.com
another Delhi based startup is doing similar stuff . but they are focusing primarily on US and Overseas market . so all the purchase info [Cost ,Availability,warranty ] is valid only for US market . is it same of r QuarkRank Too ?
Good luck to these guys .
Pingback: ReviewGist:Gurgaon based startup on semantic search, product reviews comparison to make shopping decisions simple, fast and accurate |Startups in India, Coverage of India Business
Pingback: Indian Startups in 2007 : Good times ahead! |Startups in India, Coverage of India Business
Pingback: Review of Rediff’s Product Search Portal |Technology and Business Startups in India
Hey, just found this here when i did an good yahoo search. Nice blog you have here! Keep it up!