Quarkbase is Site Research in One Step

Quarkbase is one of the best aggregators that I’ve come across on the web in quite a while.  It looks like they just launched in August of last year, but the application is loaded with information.  The tagline is “Everything about a website.”  It’s hard to argue that you need much else when you’re doing a surface level investigation of a site; any additional information and Quantcast will be boardering on being akin to an SEO analysis tool.

Besides extracting basic meta data and general indexable data from the site homepage, the Quarkbase results pool data from (or equivalent to) WHOIS, Alexa, Bloglines, CrunchBase, Twitter, Technorati, and countlesss other social bookmarking sites.  It also pulls in data from Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, as well as business oriented links to Hoovers and Zoominfo.  It is impressive how much data is aggregated in the results already; knowing that Quarkbase is going to add more features and data makes it even more impressive.

The data is grouped into sections like Popular, Technical, and People that you can navigate to independently.  This makes it a littel easier to get around the data for larger, more established sites.  An example of Quarkbase’s “smart” data is the People section.  For example, it listed me as associated with SwellPath, an association it derived from Twitter.

Visit the Tools section in the bottom navigation on Quarkbase to get the bookmarklet.  I have it prominitely featured on my toolbar with a question mark as the name; a quick click when I’m on a site and I have a wealth of info in seconds.