If you are looking to do some quick competitive analysis, a new site called BizShark offers a wealth of data about companies. Bizshark is a nifty automated information aggregator. It pulls together the latest business profiles, news, financials, web analytics, social footprint, marketing strategies, and other business information by searching across more than 50 Internet business databases. The site is pretty comprehensive and features a particularly useful tool that compares businesses with their competitors by analytics, traffic and news volume. Using its “CompetitorSort algorithm,” BizShark constantly monitors online discussion threads on related companies, products, and services and then uses a filter to rank the competition by link authority.
BizShark aggregates data from Wikipedia, our own CrunchBase, Technorati, Compete, and Google Search. Secondary sources for information include Yahoo, Quantcast, Alexa, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Indeed, BackType, and other sites. BizShark doesn’t allow users to edit or contribute data to its system, forgoing the Wiki model. Its approach is similar to Quarkbase and KillerStartups’ Dataopedia, an information aggregator that lets users see all the data it can find about a website (Dataopedia also uses Crunchbase data).
BizShark also offers premium services, where uses can pay a monthly fee of $19 to $69 per month to access employee contact information, SEO intelligence and in-depth revenue analysis. Guy Kawasaki, a fan of all things aggregated, is an adviser.
This is undoubtedly a useful tool to find business, analytics and financial information about a company in one centralized place. But without its own human input, particularly on the information that is more difficult to track by an algorithm, such as job moves, funding announcements or product introductions, there is always the possibility of misinformation. We’ve seen other aggregators, such as automated tech news site TechMeme, add a human element to their operations after realizing that algorithms aren’t perfect. But BizShark argues that because it relies solely on aggregation and algorithms for information, it is completely objective. While objectivity is good, accuracy is better.
Regardless, BizShark is definitely worth checking out. Here are a few screenshots:
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
