Deal aggregator sites are popping up all over the place and finding the deal you really want is not as easy as they make it seem. The technology for categorizing the deals and making them easily available for search has not been perfected. This means you have to scroll through countless deals before you find what you really want making the process frustrating and time consuming. Dealupa is another deal aggregator and they believe they have come up with a better solution to find the right deal, but this of course depends who ask.
DealRank
DealRank is based on the same principle as PageRank developed by Larry Page of Google. The system is designed to hopefully get you deals that are more relevant to you based primarily on where you live. Dealupa categorizes the deals using an algorithm which shows the quality of the deal based on ratings from previous customers. The system is not perfected as of yet so you still have to sift through countless deals before you find the one you want except in this case they are high quality deals you are sifting through.
The Algorithm
The algorithm uses different data to provide the deals that are most relevant to your search. It analyzes:
- Who likes and shares a deal
- How many people buy the deal
- Whether the deal is picking up pace or idle
- How it is shared on Twitter and Facebook
- Yelp rating of businesses offering the deal
This algorithm gives Dealupa a clear advantage compared to their competitors with different features which allows you to choose the type of deals you receive. One of the best features gives you the option of rejecting deals based on categories so if you are tired of receiving deals from carwashes you can choose to eliminate any carwash deal.
Categorization
The difficulty in offering the right deal to the right person is there are too many variables and at the moment there is not a technology that can accurately guess what you need. Cross referencing social media sites helps increase the delivery of the deals with more accuracy. However the information must be used to provide experiential classification meaning results based on the experiences the user has had and wants to have in the future. This kind of data gathering lets Dealupa know who their customers are on a human level instead of 0’s and 1’s.
The Founders
The founders of Dealupa Sanjay Mavinkurve and Vijay Boyapati were engineers at Google and their experience and understanding of PageRank helped them develop DealRank. Sanjay is a Harvard graduate with a B.A. and M.S. in computer science and while at Google he was on the team that developed Google Maps for mobile devices and also worked with the Google X and Google+ teams. Vijay worked as an engineer at Google as part of the team that built Google news.
The Technology
According to the founders Dealupa was built using MySQL, Memcache, PHP and JQuery. The hosting is provided by Rackspace using Amazon’s S3 storage to provide reliable service without interruptions. The crawling infrastructure is supported by Solr and PhantomJs to provide search services and power sitting on Ubuntu 11.10 operating system.
The Competition
The biggest competition for Dealupa is Groupon and Yipit but in sheer numbers the combined efforts of these two competitors does not match up to the deals Dealupa offers per city. As DealRank keeps improving and the kinks get worked out Dealupa is going to be the leader in this market.
Deal aggregator sites have eliminated the need to cut coupons but unlike a newspaper or a flyer they still haven’t managed to give you exactly what you need when you need it. With a little tweaking Dealupa will be able to lead and capitalize on a business model that generates a huge amount of cash.
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