We're back to blogging after taking a leave for more than a month. We have been very busy developing QuarkRank, a summarized reviews repository. It is a result of more than 18 months of dedicated research on Natural language processing, HTML Scrapping and User interface. Finally, we are happy to make this product live!!!

Currently, the repository is accessible using RESTful API or Widget. Moreover, its absolutely free!

About QuarkRank

"From product reviews, restaurant reviews, hotel reviews, to others, QuarkRank provides the information for making decisions at the point of purchase. Proprietary technology lies at the core of QuarkRank's ability to automatically summarize the opinions of millions of consumer reviews on the internet."

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.

QuarkRank will help consumers to quickly educate themselves, based on the most unbiased information possible, without spending hours reading review online.

If you use QuarkRank data, your customers will feel confident in making purchase decision at your site, without going to competitors, and at the same time reducing the return rate of impulse purchases.

QuarkRank provides

• Reviews gathered and combined at one place! for various products and services.
• QuarkRank, no. of reviews for a product/service
• Top 5 feature, Worst 3 feature, All features that people talk about a product/service. For example : sound quality, design, screen of a Mp3 player.
• Feature score, buzz and SNIPPETS from reviews which have opinion about a feature.

Where can you use it?

• Boost online shopping experience of your users.
  • Best and Worst about a product.
  • Graphical feature-by-feature comparison.
  • Power your navigation by giving feature as an option to choose.
  • Summarized form of reviews.
• Add product widget to your blog/article.
• On your social profile, add widget of your favourite or owned products.
• Show feature-by-feature opinions and comparison for products at your retail store.

API

QuarkRank provides a RESTful API to access our huge repository of summarized reviews. Send us simple HTTP requests and it will send back basic XML responses, which means you can interact with our API from any language.

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class Product < ActiveResource::Base
  self.site = "http://username:password@quarkrank.com"

  def self.list options={:category=>"camera"}
    find(:all, :params=>options)
  end

  def self.show sku, site=nil, all_features=false
    params = {}
    params[:site] = site unless site.nil?
    params[:all_features]="true" if all_features
    find(sku, :params=>params)
  end

  def self.search query
    find(:all,:params=>{:search=>query})
  end

end

class Snippet < ActiveResource::Base
  self.site = "http://username:password@www.quarkrank.com/products/:product_id"

  def self.snippets product, name
    find name.gsub(" ","%20"),:params=>{:product_id=>product}
  end
end

Widget

1. Top 5 features
   
2. Interactive widget for features and review snippets of a product

More informatin at:

Technologies and tools used

• HTML scrapping : NLP, Scrapi, Firequark, CSS Selectors. Implemented in Ruby.
• Text-mining : Statistics, Text parsing, chunking, cleaning and many enhancements.
• API and QuarkRank site : Ruby on Rails, REST, Acts_as_solr, Request routing.

Coming next