BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Kosmix, recently expanded their website to include a lot more than just health, travel and autos. Kosmix specializes in “algorithmically generated topic pages” for broader navigation/exploration unlike Google. In launching the new website, they’ve integrated BooRah to power restaurant searches. Kosmix uses our powerful restaurant search XML API in real-time to offer highly relevant results. E.g, check out Restaurants in Los Gatos, CA or Restaurants in San Francisco,CA to see the topic page and easy navigational links to BooRah and other sites.

Read Kosmix launch analysis from Anand Rajaraman, one of the Kosmix founders, here.

Time.com announced it’s 50 Best Websites for 2008 earlier this week. Even though we didn’t quite make it to the list, we’re thrilled to have received a mention in their evaluation. We know we have a few things to fix to hit the next level of usability for consumers and are working diligently within our constraints to provide a very valuable service. Many thanks to Anita Hamilton.

Last week Peggy Anne Salz also did a very extensive piece about our mobile application on msearchgroove.com. Her perspective on blending social recommendations and semantic search is quite creative and we’re definitely looking into enhancing features in that direction.

WapReview.com also wrote a review about our mobile service and we are humbled by Dennis’ evaluation.

As always, we look forward to valuable feedback from you in building a service that you’ll love.

We all have had our share of interesting experiences while eating out. Share a fun story about your restaurant experience and enter to win a $75 Gift card. Here’s one for starters:

A few of us (some colleagues were traveling on business) once visited this popular thai restaurant. As we got to the restaurant, we realized that we all had to sit on raised bamboo floor and take our shoes off. Quite a predicament! One of the gals refused to take her shoes off, turns out she hadn’t changed her socks in a few days and was concerned they’d smell. Finally, after much convincing, she agreed to take the socks off as well and sat little farther away from group with her feet spread outward. As we were ready to leave, some one from the adjacent table approached her, chatted for a few mins and handed her his business card. As luck would have it, the guy was a footwear designer and wanted to cast her in a footwear commercial! We all just couldn’t help but giggle and laugh at the whole situation when we found out about it later.

Now that may be an unusual story, but we’re sure some of you have some interesting aspects to share with us. Here are a few themes to trigger your memory :

• Romantic date(s)
• Family parties/get togethers
• Business meals or trips out of town
• Restaurants in your neighborhood that you hadn’t discovered in a decade
• Interesting ordering situations

So, just jot down a few quick comments from your experience in response to this blog and you’re entered to win $75 Gift Card.

We’ll award the gift card to the best story (in our sole determination) posted in the comments to this blog by the end of the day on June 18.  Please be sure to include your email address.

OpenID has come a long way since it’s inception a year and a half ago. It’s usage has gone mainstream, & open source libraries are available to help companies enable their own sites for OpenID. With BooRah’s growing user-base and multiple partners we’re integrating with, there is no better time to support this open standard on our site. So, you can now login to BooRah with your OpenID and start experiencing seamless integration with some of our partners (others to come).

Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo’s SearchMonkey is a unique step in opening up search to publishers to enhance the quality of the search experience for consumers. Earlier this week, Alex Iskold over at ReadWriteWeb wrote an interesting post quoting Peter Mika about how meta data needs to be on the page for users to see and experience it. We, at BooRah, have focused not only on extracting structured meta data such as tags, ratings etc., but also inferring relevant meta data from sentiments in user reviews (in restaurants for now) using sentiment extraction technology. The following listing is an example of search result on Yahoo for a popular San Francisco restaurant - Oola.

This first page listing for Oola in San Francisco contains more relevant information for a consumer than any of the other search results on that page. With one click, one can see the restaurant’s menu, make a reservation, write a review, and get discounts!. Also, based on our inferred meta data, the user sees that “ahi tuna appetizers”, “oysters” etc.. are worth exploring at that place. Furthermore, the granularity of the rating helps users that are looking to dine out on special occasions.

To see our enhanced results in Yahoo for your searches,  visit http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=wKB and select the “Add Infobar” button .

So, take BooRah’s SearchMonkey implementation for a spin and let us know what you think.

Planning a romantic dinner for two from the comfort of your home? Or, driving down the peninsula in your buddy’s car while subconsciously craving for delicious Tiramisu? Well, BooRah is here to help you no matter where you are or how ‘connected’ you are. We just rolled out the next rev of our semantic full-text search engine.

Why use BooRah?

• It’s easy! No filters to play with, no search refinement. Our search engine just gets it. here, try out a few searches: best foie gras in san francisco, great view san francisco, tiramisu menlo park, best deep dish pizza in chicago
• Access anyway you like:
  • We now support mobile users. Simply punch in boorah.com on your mobile browser and you’re on your way.
  • Smart browser search plugin. Install our plugin and be amazed how well it understands various queries
    
    Note: Works only on Firefox 2.0+ and IE7+
  • SMS search: Text “boorah <search query>” to 4INFO (44636) to receive results via SMS
    E.g.: boorah pho mountain view
• Look Beyond options: BooRah will prompt you to look beyond your current geography when there aren’t enough choices. E.g., a search for Pad Thai in Atherton, CA yields no results. However, check out how easily you can look around in neighboring cities.
  
• Utility links: We have aggregated hundreds of thousands of useful links so you don’t have to go looking for restaurant discounts, online reservations, or menus. Try it yourself: reservations in Palo Alto, discounts in New York, online menus in Mountain View

What do you think? Tell us what you like or don’t like about our search.

Foodies, here’s your opportunity to taste and dine at the top restaurants in San Francisco.  You can try out restaurants like Aziza, Foreign Cinema, Oola and many others at very affordable prices.

If you missed the January 2008 event, here’s a second chance for you to try your favorite restaurant or a hot spot that would otherwise be an expensive affair. Specially prepared 3-course lunch are $21.95 and dinners are $31.95.  Dates and times of participation vary by restaurant.   You can check out all the participating restaurants  along with their reviews and ratings on BooRah. BooRah has aggregated all the reviews from various sources for these restaurants and gives you a quick snapshot of which restaurants offer the best food or service or atmosphere. So, create your “Favorite Dine About Restaurant List” on BooRah (see mine here)and go out and have fun. If you’d like to write reviews and rate those restaurants, you can always come back to BooRah and  make it your destination for all restaurant searches.

Enjoy early summer and indulge yourself with food and wine at the 2008 Dine About Town event.

Restaurant Hospitality Magazine writes about some tactics that restaurant owners could start to use to try to strike back against negative reviews/comments about their restaurant on the web:

“You’ve had to put up with the zero-accountability blogging phenomenon for years. But now a new option has emerged: you can hire an independent, third-party company to manage your online reputation. Their promise: No matter what a disgruntled customer, former employee or competitor posts about your restaurant, the online reputation management company will make it difficult for potential customers to find those negative references on the web.”

We here at BooRah have certainly heard our share of complaints about all the “drive-by” restaurant reviewers out there.   For example, in response to a question posed to panelists at the recent Restaurant Bootcamp here in San Francisco - “Q: What’s the biggest challenge to starting a restaurant?” the answer was a single word: “Yelp”.

So, as a service for restaurateurs, we’ve recently introduced a free service - Track Your Restaurant Reviews. Once you sign up, if your restaurant gets a review written about it, we’ll let you know.

While we don’t condone sketchy tactics like trying to “hide” reviews — in fact, we do our best to provide a cross-source, objective look at all restaurant reviews — what you do next is your business.

Here are two search queries that I’ve been pointed to, that deliver great relevance on BooRah.

• Restaurants with Great View in San Francisco
• Restaurants that serve Idly Sambar near 110 Rio Robles, San Jose

For the “great view in San Francisco” search, the results were really good, but what amazed me was the accompanying map that lends credibility to the results.

The second search is something that I’d do often but have not tried it until now. Idli Sambar is a south indian breakfast, snack, appetizer item that is a very frequently ordered at a south Indian restaurant. Not only are the results on the attached screen right on, but if you search for other options beyond the 5 mile radius( idli sambar beyond san jose), you get the complete list of places for you to choose from, which is perfect (atleast for Shrisha and my tastes).

What are your favorite searches on BooRah?

In the past few weeks we have gotten a lot of concrete feedback on areas for improvement/features on our website. We have deployed a new release with the following major features/enhancements:

a) Mobile Support: You can now search our entire database of restaurants on your phone using a very simple and easy to use interface. For most of the phones, if you select http://www.boorah.com, you’ll be automatically redirected to the mobile site. Where we cannot detect the user-agent for your phone, please enter our mobile restaurant search website (http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/m). The search results are exactly the same as you’d get on the Web and you’ll also see a simple summary of the restaurant in addition to our ratings for the restaurant. Mobile is where sentiment extraction and summarization are extremely valuable and this is our first release.

Here are a few examples of queries that may be highly relevant on phone:

Pizza in Mission, San Francisco

sushi in 94123

indian at El Camino and Castro, Mountain View

The search results are sorted similar to what you’d get on the web at boorah.com. The following screen shots are simple 2 level drill down to get the details and additional information.The summary and ratings are generated by our patent-pending summary and scoring system.

The following details screen shows number of reviews, overall popularity (expressed as %Rah) and a system generated summary.

PS: We’re adding support for maps and directions soon.

b)Navigational Enhancements between City and Metro Landing Pages - We have made our navigation between metro and city pages simpler( atleast we think so). The metro pages primarily provide navigational help in selecting a city. Also, if someone wishes to search across an entire area ( one might consider doing that for special dining occasions), we still support the “best of searches” across the entire metro area.

We’ve also incorporated a simple map to aid in selecting our coverage or drill down to cities that may not necessarily be listed at the top. We were able to find a very flexible, configurable and versatile map from backspace.com.

c) Search and Other Minor Enhancements - We’ve now incorporated a new full-text search engine in the backend which gives us a big boost on the performance and scalability. We are also making other tweaks to ranking algorithms to improve the overall relevance and search quality. We have also optimized content and spacing on pages.

Check out our new features and let us know your feedback.