BooRah - Inside the Buzz

We’ve launched a new version of our restaurant review site, one that has some readily apparent new features, as well as some features that might not be as apparent, that we’ll talk about here.  The goal of our site refresh is to continue to demonstrate that BooRah’s technology approach gives you the most comprehensive view of restaurants that’s available on the Internet:

Ratings - What’s bad (Boo) and what’s good (Rah), and the new BooRah "% Rah’d" system.  Five-star ratings are nice, but we wanted to give you a bit more granularity than that to stack up restaurants against each other.  First, we built a "Boo" and "Rah" voting system, where a user (or a review! yes, written reviews can place votes all by themselves!) places votes either for (Rah) or against (Boo) a restaurant.  "% Rah’d" is simply a measure of what percent of all the votes were positive (Rah).  We’ll write more in the near future about the voting algorithms we use to generate scores from written reviews — those scores are NOT just from users clicking the Boo and Rah buttons — they’re actually composite scores representing a wide swath of user opinions across the Internet.

Reviews by Source - We now break out by source where all those reviews on a given restaurant are coming from.  With the proliferation of review sites, sources, and an increase in the overall number of reviews, we now show you source-by-source who’s mouthing off on a given restaurant.

More Summary Information - In addition to showing you by-source breakouts, we’ve also scanned through all the reviews to give you an overall "keyword level" view of what’s getting the attention from reviewers on each site.  We call them Boo-tags and Rah-tags, and you can see them on nearly every restaurant details page, as well as in selected other areas of the site.  Of course, you can also get a list with links to the actual reviews if you want to see all the reviews for yourself.

More Content - We’ve also added other kinds of content besides reviews, including menus from Menupages.com (and others), offers and coupons from Valpak, discount gift cards from Restaurant.com, carryout/delivery services from GetQuick and SeamlessWeb, photos, tags, and of course more reviews!

Better Navigation - We’ve also dramatically changed our page layouts - we hope you like them better.  By separating search results (the list of restaurants that best match what you search for) and the restaurant details page, we’re able to place the map, additional restaurant recommendations, and other information more prominently on each of the two separate page types.

BooRah "Review Reader" Homepage - We’ve revamped our homepage to show you a "Review Reader" view of the latest reviews from across the web, all indexed back to the restaurant detail pages where you can see a full set of information (including the latest review) on that restaurant.  Our Review Reader even includes restaurant advertising units - featuring coupons and discount cards good at local restaurants in your area.

We hope you like the changes we’re making.  There’s much more to talk about… which we’ll cover in upcoming posts.  We continue to adapt and improve our site — so please let us know what you like or don’t like about it.

BooRah (restaurant reviews) would hiss, then cheer.

                                                   - Michelle Quinn, LA Times, in
                                                   "Dot-com names get dottier"

We’ve begun to revamp our website, better tieing in the name of the company with what we do.  Here’s a sneak-peak of our new logo - yes, that’s a "tomato splat" on the Boo.  Of course, BooRah is all about telling you what’s good and bad about a place, so we’re getting more explicit with our logo and branding!  You’ll also soon see more tie-ins to our website’s features.

Stay tuned!